A Virtualized Publishing Industry

According to Peter Kelly, who headed Nortel’s enterprise division in Europe, the virtual office “is probably the most significant business dynamic taking place . . . the virtual enterprise model will allow companies to leapfrog others. It really is a case of virtualise or die.”

In fact, publishing has been virtualizing since the 1990s, when companies sought to save money by outsourcing to freelancers and allowing employees to work at home. Increasingly much of the actual work on books, such as the editing, took place elsewhere. As e-mail became common, text began to be sent back and forth electronically. It was only a minor leap to imagine going from a physical company with a network of telecommuting employees and freelancers to having a company that functioned entirely out of a virtual office.

This ABC news report highlights three companies—IBM, Accenture, and Crayon—that are heading toward virtualized work worlds. Here in our own business we work through a virtual office and a network of distributed workers, and along with the rest of the publishing world, we are on the edge of a technology explosion that will make our everyday work lives unrecognizable.

Thomas Riggs
Thomas Riggs & Company
Missoula, Montana

From Thomas Riggs & Co. Blog: www.thomasriggs.net/blog

Our Virtual Office
Thomas Riggs & Company, Missoula, Montana

Thomas Riggs & Co. is based in Missoula, Montana. The company was founded and incorporated there, and some of our employees and contractors live in the state. But you won’t find a building in Missoula where all of us work. The company’s owner, Thomas Riggs, is a resident of  Missoula but spends most of the year in France. Mariko Fujinaka, the managing editor, lives in Portland, Oregon. Each morning we do what most people do. We get up, have our coffee, and go to the office. Only our office doesn’t have a building. It’s located in a virtual space on the Internet.

Why do we work in a virtual office? Wouldn’t it be easier to see each other in person every day? Part of the answer lies in our history. Publishing has long been experimenting with distributed workforces, either telecommuting employees or freelancers, and most people in our company worked for a publisher in a physical building before becoming a freelancer. Each of us left a traditional workspace for different reasons, but we all sought a new arrangement in which we could have greater control over lives, including where we lived. At Thomas Riggs & Co. we do’t care if people live and work in Missoula, New York, Frankfurt, or Singapore. Our goal is to provide people with the best working conditions possible, so we’re happy that our employees, as well as our freelance editors and writers, can live where they want.

The technology that supports virtual offices is new and changing quickly, and we expect our office to be in a continual transition. Our current office is supported by an interconnected suite of Microsoft programs: SharePoint (providing configurable workspaces for files, calendars, discussions, notes, assignments, contact lists, and personal offices), Outlook (shared tasks and e-mail), Communicator (instant messaging, as well as voice and video calls), and Live Meeting (for video conferencing and desktop sharing). As much as possible we try to recreate a physical office in a virtual space.  Just like in a physical office, we can see and talk with each other, as well as work together on the same text.

We know that we are part of a large, worldwide movement toward virtual workplaces. Virtual offices have the potential to help people gain more control over their lives while maintaining the benefits of working for a company. Virtual office programs provide extraordinary tools for organization and collaboration, allowing employees to work better and more efficiently. Because virtual workspaces don’t require physical structures or people to commute to work, they are environmentally friendly. We look forward to further advances in virtual office technology, and we hope to use it to improve both our work lives and the quality of our work.

Additional Resources

Thomas Riggs and Co :: Home Page
Thomas Riggs and Co :: Article on Betaflow
Thomas Riggs and Co :: Listed on Review-inc.com
Thomas Riggs and Co :: Information on Incprofile.com
Thomas Riggs and Co :: Article on 800review.com
Thomas Riggs and Co :: Article on 4WorkLife