Page 55 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

34 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

typical “road warrior” we conjure up when thinking about mobile work:
harried, tired, and—though still thrilled with the work—ultimately
burned out from traveling. When asked about his travels, Grassberger
remarked, “I spend a ton of time in cities that I never see. I arrive,
usually get on a shuttle or catch a cab to a hotel, hold meetings at the
hotel, catch a cab to the airport, and fly home.” We’ll learn in Chapter
8
3 that many of these workers will be able to reduce their travel time
as telepresence technology, such as Hewlett-Packard’s Halo system,
becomes more available, or by using more traditional methods, such as
cell phones, VoIP, or virtual offices. And in this chapter we’ve already
learned that some mobile workers—“corridor warriors”—can take
their work with them as they roam through hallways, buildings, or
stores.
But what would happen if the work itself could be executed sepa-
rately from the worker? Sharon Kay, in a piece called “Remote Sur-
gery,” describes one possibility:

A patient is prepped for surgery. The anesthesiologist asks him to count
backward from 10—he fades out at 5. Everyone in the operating room is
wearing scrubs and a mask, but one critical person is missing—the sur-
geon. Not only is the surgeon absent from the operating theater; he’s not
even in the same hospital, or on the same continent! He’s actually per-
forming surgery from thousands of miles away in a room with dimmed
lights, multiple television monitors, a surgical console, and a computer
that connects him via a high-speed fiber-optic link to robotic arms in the
operating room. It’s called telesurgery—a technology with far-reaching
implications. 9

The first transatlantic surgery occurred on September 7, 2001,
when a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, France, had a gall bladder
operation led by a surgeon in New York. Dr. Richard Satava, Professor
of Surgery at the University of Washington Medical Center and Se-
nior Science Advisor at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Mate-
riel Command, believes that surgery will be completely automated 40