GENOA - Telecommuting

by Max Lindegger

I hadn't heard of Donnie Morrison until I picked up a Business Life magazine on my recent flight back from Europe. He has become a bit of a guru in the Outer Hebrides where he has done wonders with job creation. I think we all could learn from him, or at the very least get some much needed encouragement.

Morrison, who hails from the Island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, has been able to create 100 or so jobs "the sort requiring brains, not brawn" in a place typical of villages we find all around the world - communities in dire need of any work.

Donnie Morrison is a crusader for teleworking because he himself was affected by the isolation of his island. While he was educated on Lewis, like everybody else from the island with ambition he had to travel to the mainland for work. The light lit up for him when he attended a sales conference where Compaq computers emphasised the new generation of portable computers. The conference presenter spoke of the huge potential of working from home. The best place to live for such workers, the presenter advised, would be "either the fringes of the golf course of St. Andrews or in the Western Isles".

Soon after, Morrison was given a project job from Western Isles Enterprises (WIE), and re-located "home". The next step was to travel widely through the islands to recruit his potential work force from what is a highly educated population - the Western Isles have the highest number of graduates per capita in the UK. He found top-level academics "rotting away". He collected a database of 160 names.

He then set out to identify clients to match his skill pool. A tip off lead to Information Access, a US based company who were looking to take business stories from all over the US and crunch them down into a huge, up to the minute, searchable database. Donnie said his people could do it - and six months later he had his first contract pending. Donnie persuaded the local council to train 18 teleworkers, and buy each of them a suitable computer. Each worker was linked with an e-mail. conferencing system so they could share their problems, file their efforts and be party to any feedback from the US. Since this success, more clients were added and since then work has included compiling databases of police forensic reports and transferring a music encyclopedia onto CD ROM.

As a future step he wants to develop teleservice centres, for which he is targeting customers in publishing and software testing. He has had a first success - the Gleann Seilach business park has been built "on spec" by the WIE and an internet call support centre is moving in, creating 70 new jobs. For many, it’s the way of the future.