The longer I'm involved in this field, the less certain I am about its future -simply because it is evolving in ways that none of us expected. The one-year projection is easy: continued growth along the same lines as we see today, with what has become the typical 10-15% annual growth in the number of telecommuters and an increasing diversity in the types of employers and job types involved.

Five years out is a little trickier. My best guess is that we will see the beginning of the end of telecommuting by that time, in the sense that telecommuting as we typically know it will morph into a much broader concept of remote access. That's already happening, in fact - many employers and vendors are starting to divide work into work done in the traditional office vs. work done elsewhere. The "elsewhere" can be at home, on an airplane, at the beach house, at a client site, in a telework center, in a hotel room, etc. From a technology standpoint, where the "elsewhere" is really doesn't make a lot of difference. From a policy and Human Resources standpoint, however, the work-at-home variety of remote work will still be markedly different.

Another relevant factor five years from now is the continued evolution of business models and organization structures. What we're seeing today with the growth of smaller, more agile companies and Internet commerce is only the beginning. In my view the dominant business models will no longer be the AT&T/IBM/General Motors type of organizations. These newer and culturally-different organizations will find the concept of telecommuting and flexible work in general to be second-nature to them.

Ten years out is almost impossible to predict, only because of how quickly and how unpredictably the underlying technologies are changing. I'd like to think that within ten years the majority of employers will say to their employees (or associates, or affiliates, or whatever we call them) "work where you work best." That is, given the available technology and your own personal preferences and the requirements of your clients and management, locate yourself each day where you are most likely to be able to do your best work and add the most value.

Two good sources of forecasts and current estimates are the sites maintained by Jack Nilles (JALA International) and Joanne Pratt (Joanne H. Pratt Associates) .