The Dispersed Office
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb057273 |
| Published date | 01 July 1982 |
| Date | 01 July 1982 |
| Pages | 31-32 |
| Author | Peter Harvey |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
The Dispersed Office
by Peter Harvey
The Industrial Revolution led to vast social changes in the
19th century. Workers moved from dispersed locations in
the countryside to concentrations in towns to be near their
place of work. Today most industrial and commercial ac-
tivity still takes place in concentrations in towns. Though
many of the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolu-
tion — slums, poverty, squalor — have disappeared, most
people still travel to their place of work at the office or the
factory. The total cost, in time taken and energy consumed
by people travelling to work, is enormous. With the
microchip revolution this is now beginning to change. Us-
ing modern communications technology, more and more
people are finding that they do not need to travel to a place
of work; they can work at home. Nevertheless, because
people always resist change, this new way of working is
evolving only slowly.
Electronic computers made their debut in the world of
business some 25 years ago. Technological progress has
since been extremely rapid and now all but the smallest
businesses are bound to be involved in electric data pro-
cessing in some form or another, but it is only very recently
since the development of videotex, a technology invented
by Sam Fedida of the Post Office, whereby computers can
be linked to domestic television receivers via ordinary
telephone lines, that professional people have found that
they can do much of their office work effectively at home.
However, it needs to be realised that an "office" is not a
building with four walls in which is housed a lot of tangible
equipment such as desks, typewriters, filing cabinets etc,
but an intangible concept. An "office" is a means of pro-
viding a service for a business to communicate and record.
Communication can be verbal or visual by means of a
screen or by words or pictures on paper. Recording can be
on paper, on film or in an electronic memory.
Office staff can be divided into two categories: pro-
cedural workers and occupational workers. The distinction
is the span of discretion in the use of their time. Procedural
workers, such as word processor operators, computer
operating staff etc, do their work according to pre-
determined practices or procedures. The occupational
workers are the managers, accountants, lawyers etc and all
those whose value to the concern for which they work is
their knowledge and experience.
The office apart from being a communications exchange
for the team who work for the firm and the recording cen-
tre for the firm, also acts as the receiving point for com-
munications, whether by letter, by telephone or by com-
puter from outside organisations, agents, distributors and
staff who are working at home. The office also acts as
distributing centre to pass on these communications as re-
quired to whom they are addressed. The office may also be
a training centre. For instance, where a CAL (computer
assisted learning) system operates, staff can be taught pro-
cedures by means of a VDU and computer, with which
they can communicate, instead of having to go to an out-
side training establishment, which may entail travel and
perhaps even special accommodation, both of which are
needless expenses.
With this concept of today's "office" and the facilities
provided by modern technology, Rediffusion Computers
Ltd have launched a range of integrated office computer
systems, called the R2800 range. Basically, the R2800
"Telecentre", to give it its umbrella term, presupposes
that office workers may not be physically in the office;
they may be at home, in another office or abroad.
All work stations in the R2800 range can be located
either in a firm's office building, in which case they are
connected by cable or internal telephone line, or they can
be located anywhere else provided there is a telephone line
link. Procedural work stations are provided for clerical
workers with fixed functions tasks such as data entry, data
processing, text or word processing and handprint process-
ing. Occupational work stations are provided for
secretarial, professional, technical and management per-
sonnel. Service stations include electronic scanning in-trays
and computer-assisted learning stations. External work
stations include videotex terminals and voice-response
systems. The Telecentre in its physical form is a box about
the size of a filing cabinet located somewhere in the office
building.
The Telecentre was originally conceived by Rediffusion
Computers in 1977 and has been the subject of progressive
development in hardware, software and firmware over the
past five years. The software includes, apart from the
management software, the Advisor, a management sup-
port system, and a corporate videotex system (CVS). Ad-
visor looks after the text processing, in-tray, diary.-desk-
top,
document managing and administration. CVS pro-
vides all the facilities of public videotex systems together
with the interfaces to data and other information net-
works.
There are four models in the R2800 range: the R2810,
R2820, R2830 and R2840. These differ only in the number
of work stations that can be connected, which range from
eight to 64. Each system can be connected to any other
system. A workstation can work on any system. Of the
four systems only the R2840 is a multiple minicomputer
JULY/AUGUST 1982 31
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