England has been studying and working in the telework field since 1989, promoting both the benefits and implementation processes that overcome problems, to organizations and governments.

He says research findings suggest teleworking can be a solution for many different employment and related issues, including peak hour traffic congestion in major cities, skilled labour shortages, company carbon footprints resulting from maintaining large office spaces, car parks and travel and the demands that new generations of workers are placing on employers in relation to work/life balance.

During his most recent visit to Australia England facilitated a number of special education seminars on teleworking to the Australian Computer Society discussing how teleworking could provide flexibility in the workplace and exploring future trends in mobile working. He says most of the perceived barriers, revolving around the legal standing of teleworkers, fears that managing teleworkers is difficult, and occupational health and safety concerns, are easily resolved.

England was contacted by the Australian federal government to produce and manage the Telework Australia initiative in early 2007. That initiative has a number of components, including the Web site and a range of promotional activities.

"The message is that there is a body of resource freely available for CIOs to readily access, look at and consider and if they have problems there are people like me standing behind it who can help them directly," England says.

"CIOs quite often have huge budgets for technology, they have responsibility for making sure that that technology is cost effective to the organization, and they would like personally to have an ability to spend more on it and to get better use out of it. What has been found with teleworkers is that CIOs can get more value out of their existing investment as the load is spread over a wide period. That means better value out of stretched resources, including office space."

A recent report in the Baltimore Sun estimated telecommuting had created more than $US20 billion dollars of savings annually across the US economy, England says. The report claimed a ten percent rise in the number of workers telecommuting only once a week would lead to fuel use drop of 1.2 million gallons per week and workers' productivity increasing by between 10 and 25 percent.