I don't agree with the author's argument. Here's one excerpt:<p>"In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country."<p>1) I'm pretty sure a multi-national corporation with 400,000 employees considers hand-carrying paperwork to be an operational deficiency. This is the 21st century, why create an unnecessary paper-trail when your company <i>builds products</i> to specifically handle this type of use-case?<p>2) Is the author talking about some sort of routine process (Level 1 Support needs to escalate the issue to someone in L2) or some sort of special case (A client is experience a major outage and we need to find an expert who can fix it)? If it's the former, then this should be a documented repeatable process that is done many times a day, and thus why would it matter if the L1 and L2 are in different buildings/countries/whatever.. If it's the latter, then the chances of the right expert working in the same building as person seeking her out is going to be pretty low. Telecommuting does come into play in either of these scenarios.<p>3) The author seems to be correlating telecommuting with increased bureaucracy. I'd argue that reducing telecommuting will not decrease bureaucracy; it will still take 4-6 approvals to make that purchase, and the tools to expedite the approval process (contacting the right people directly, escalating to managers) will still be the same.