Teleworking and Business Reengineering: Lessons learned from Operating Systems development

First an outline on Teleworking (TW) and its specific needs is presented. Then a review of the evolutionary development of Operating systems is given, focusing on the current Client Server Architectures. It is explained, that a process oriented view, as it is typical for Client Server Systems is also needed in order to handle TW and to manage TW oriented jobs. Currently the demand for TW- jobs is much higher than the number of jobs offered by employers. One reason is, that from a company's point of view , there are no entirely convincing arguments to introduce TW lacking in acceptable trade-off concerning costs. However this can be overcome, if a (radical) business reengineering process is applied on hierarchical structures: most enterprises still are organised by such functional treelike structures. This has much in common when Operating Systems, based on a hierarchical design and structured by layers have been modified towards autonomous subprocesses (clients) demanding services from other independent processes (servers). These similarities are appealing and we can learn from these experiences made. In this context we also might discuss, whether TW is just a mode of operation or whether it can be seen as profession of its own having impact on appropriate curricula.