Beyond Control

Organizations must also consider occupational health and safety issues for workers using computers outside the office where the working environment is not tightly controlled. "My sense is, yes, we get people to read the policy and recommendations and get people to sign something to say that they have read it, but there is no supervision of that," Arnold says.

"Hypothetically a user could be squatting on the floor of the lounge room and could have an injury or accident. It's a very grey area. I'm not sure what people could do about it - send people round to check on OH&S once a month? Before we had wireless it meant that the user had to be in one place, generally in the study or at a desk in the lounge room. But now they could be lying on the ground and not in an ergonomic position, injure their neck or back and there could be a claim - who knows?"

Hewlett-Packard - considered a champion of telecommuting until it announced earlier this year that telecommuting privileges were being withdrawn from its own IT team - still allows some employees to work remotely and takes seriously OH&S issues. Christopher Hood, a former architect and now program manager for the HP workplace based in South Carolina, says the company runs an online self-assessment program that everyone who telecommutes has to participate in regularly.

Called Workwell, the system asks people to report on issues such as where they are seated when working, describe their posture and so forth. The responses are then used to perform a risk analysis. "And those who are identified as medium or high risk are referred to our health and safety group," Hood says.

So there are techniques to tackle the OH&S concerns, but if it should become a lawyers' playground then the lawyers will be well versed in remote access issues. Lawyers have nurtured Australia's BlackBerry infestation and driven massive demand for remote access, particularly over the past three to five years, according to Garry Clarke, director of technology and information services at Clayton Utz. "There is an increasing demand for flexibility; for being able to remove the restrictions of working within an office. It is my challenge to remove the time and place restrictions."

And the lawyers are asking for more than mere e-mail access: they want access to all their documents, all the knowledge in the firm on a specific topic, and to be able to access that on any computer - the firm's, their own or a computer in an Internet cafe or friend's house. "They don't want infrastructure to inhibit their work," Clarke says.

Although the demand for telecommuting support has risen over time, there has been a distinct change in demand. "The lawyers' expectation of what they can do at work is now driven by what they can do at home," Clarke says. Younger lawyers in particular are used to using their home computers to Google anything - they want to be able to search their work system just as freely.