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2.2 Working Practices

This section covers the use of ICT and how it has changed patterns of working.

Topics to be learned:

1. Home working or teleworking

2. Remote working

3. Office-based working

4. Videoconferencing

5. Instant messaging

6. Faxing and Electronic Faxing

Home working / Teleworking

Teleworking is another name for working from home. When a person “teleworks”, it means that some or all of the work they do is done at home using modern technology.

Development in ICT devices and systems have made it easier for jobs that used to be done in an office to be carried out at home.

The number of people working from home using ICT systems is increasing year by year.

In 2005, 11% of the working population in Europe was working at home using ICT. This varied from Finland with 29% to France and Spain, which both had 5 % of the workforce working from home.

New technology developments such as portable communication devices as well as home computer systems and networks have enabled people to become less tied to an office to do work.

Various Technologies

WirelessNetworks

Broadband connection

PortableCommunication

Devices

VirtualPrivate

Network(VPN)

PersonalDigital

Assistant(PDA)

Technologies

Teleworkers

Needs of a Teleworker

• Access to E-mail

• A PC with Internet access

• A landlinephone

• A mobilephone • A printer/

photocopier

• A fax machine

Types of employment suitable for teleworking

Empl

oym

ent S

ervi

ces

Professional services such as tax advice, legal advice and

financial advice

Writing

Book editing

Proof reading of documents and books

Technical and customer support

Telesales and marketing

Personal traits of a Teleworker

Have good time management skills.

Be well motivated.

Have good communication skills.

Have good self discipline.

Be able to meet deadlines.

Remote working

Teleworking or home working is a major aspect of remote working, but there is another type. This is when people work at a distance from the main office, for example travelling salesmen, employees working in a temporary office, doctors on call and engineers working on site.

Technologies that are used:

Technologies

PDAs or other handheld computers

with wireless networking capability

Mobile telephonesLaptops with wireless networking capability

Applications:

Engineers on site can use a PDA to e-mail their reports. They are able to view technical manuals relevant to their field of work and use sophisticated database and word-processing software.

Doctors can use laptops with wireless network capability connected to a high-security VPN. They are able to access patient records, X-Rays, and so on, whilst visiting patients in their home.

Travelling salesmen who have to work away from their office can take advantage of wireless hot-spots with their laptops and PDA. They can use mobile phones to talk to their salesmen. They can also connect to their main office using wireless connectivity through the hotel they are staying at.

For any of these groups of workers, remote access services (RAS) are available. These allow them to access the desktop on their own PC when they are away from home or the office.

Office-based working

Despite the tendency for the number of teleworkers to increase there are a number of reasons why many companies retain their offices.Some are based on what is best for the company and some are at the request of the workers.Many companies still think that if they allowed their employees to work at home, many workers would spend the day watching television or taking part in other non-productive activities.There is also the feeling that data is not safe or confidential as employees if it is being transmitted outside the company.Many employees fear the prospect of isolation. They look forward to chatting with their colleagues during their breaks.A number of employees are also fearful for their jobs, feeling that if they are out of the normal daily routine they might easier to lay off when the company is looking to make redundancies.

Required Equipment:

Technologies used

Desktop computers connected to a LAN /

WAN.

Internet and e-mail

facilities

Networked printers

Videoconferencing

A videoconference is the electronic equivalent to a conventional conference usually held in a conference suite, sometimes called a face-to-face conference.

• Members of the conference need to log on to the system of Internet and when the software is running they can normally see and hear all the delegates involved.

• The need to communicate by speaking in to the microphone and looking at the webcam, which is normally fixed to the top of the monitor.

• Conference members are able to examine documents using normal software, discuss modifications or additions to the documents and physically making the amendments.

The essential components of a videoconference are: A standard PC with mouse and keyboard. A monitor Speakers A network connection (a broadband speed of at least a few

hundred Mbits per second is essential to ensure that the quality of transmission is sufficient).

A webcam. A microphone Videoconferencing software.

Essential Components

Videoconferencing is used in a wide variety of applications: In education, schools quite commonly use it to communicate

with other schools, particularly in remote locations. In medical applications, nurses and doctors can discuss cases

even though they might be a long way away from each other. Business use it quite often instead of face-to-face conferences,

and also for teleworkers to communicate with their base office.

Practical Applications

When videoconferencing was initially introduced, there were certain limitations: Poor quality of transmission due to the speed of Internet. Lack of technical skills on the part of the employees made it

difficult to communicate effectively.

Limitations

These conferences can be held using mobile telephones, landline telephones or voice over the Internet protocol (VOIP – the use of phones connected through computers to the Internet).

Types of videoconferencing

Videoconferencing

Individual

Group / Multiple

In order for a phone conference to take place, at least 3 people must be involved.

Each participant has a personal identification number (PIN) that they key into the phone after they have dialled the phone number for the conference.

The person who is organizing the conference is given two PINs by the phone company. One is their personal PIN and the other is the participants’ PIN.

The organizer then contacts all the people who are going to be involved in the conference and tells them the participants’ PIN and the agreed time and the time of the conference.

This is the linking together of several people on a phone line so that they can have a collective conversation. It is possible to hold these conferences using mobile telephones, landline telephones or voice over the Internet protocol (VOIP – the use of phones connected through computers to the Internet) but each participant must have a touchtone phone.

In order for a phone conference to take place, there must be at least three people involved.

Phone conferencing

Instant messaging is the exchange of text messages between two or more people logged into a particular instant messaging (IM) service.

It is an interactive service, as people can reply immediately to others logged into the same system.

It requires a user name (often an e-mail address) and a password. When someone logs on for the first time they have to make a list of people they want to contact- these individuals need to agree to be contacts. Then they select the individual they want to talk to and send a message.

If the contact happens to be online at the same time they can reply, leading to a conversation. It is better than e-mail because messages are sent immediately, whereas e-mail messages can be stored on a mail server for seconds or even minutes.

Instant Messaging

THE IDEA FOR THE FAX MACHINE HAS BEEN AROUND FOR 170 YEARS

We joke about the fax machine being ancient history—a relic of the late 20th century and the dark ages before email attachments and cloud-based storage—but it really is pretty old.

Fathers of InventionThe earliest facsimile (from the Latin fac simile, “make alike”) device was invented in 1843 by Scotsman Alexander Bain. A clockmaker by trade, he used clock parts to synchronize the movement of a transmitter and a receiver for line-by-line "scanning" of messages and images. While Bain’s lab experiments were promising, Englishman Frederick Bakewell beat him to the patent office with his “image telegraph,” and Bain’s machine never took off.

Bakewell’s machine sent the first successful “telefax” transmission in 1847. It could transmit handwritten words and simple drawings, but was of little use beyond demonstrations at the the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 because of long transmission times and unreliable synchronization.

The first practical fax machine that saw sustained use was the pantelegraph, built in the 1850s by Giovanni Caselli, an Italian priest, physicist, and inventor (and a bit of a rabblerouser—while living in Modena as a tutor, he participated in demonstrations demanding the annexation of Modena to Piedmont and was tossed out by its duke).

Fax is short for facsimile transmission.

A fax machine is connected to a phone line. A document is scanned and then transmitted through phone lines to another fax machine that then prints it out.

It requires the use of a modem and so the speed of transmission tends to be slow.

It is used when exact copies of originals are required, although the quality of the copy is sometimes not very good.

Many organizations tend not to use fax machines as such but prefer to have 'all-in-one' printers. These are inkjet printers which have scanning and faxing facilities built in to them.

Faxing

Although many uses of fax are being replaced by the use of e-mail and other Internet services the fax is still used in a number of ways.

In the U.K., signed documents are not considered to be legally acceptable when sent by e-mail but they are acceptable when sent by fax.

In the USA, weather maps are distributed by government bodies using fax.

Many newspapers are prepared at a central location and then printed at a number of printing plants. The publishers send copies of their newspapers by fax to these plants using fax via satellite.

Uses of faxing

Since the introduction of manual faxing a number of electronic systems have been developed.

For example, there are systems that use the Internet for faxing.

Instead of printing our a document and faxing it using a fax machine, the user 'prints' the document directly to fax software, which uses the modem or broadband to send the fax.

The receiver either receives it on their fax machine or uses the same type of software to convert it into a document for storage.

Electronic Faxing

Electronic faxing has the following advantages over traditional, manual faxing:

It saves the time of going to the fax machine to retrieve or send faxes.

Equipment costs are lower as there is no need for a fax machine.

Running costs are lower as there is no need for a dedicated fax line.

Confidential faxes are secure. On a manual fax. Any worker might pick up a fax sent to someone else.

It is not necessary to be in the office to receive faxes as they can be downloaded remotely.

Benefits of Electronic Faxing

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