Rural Telework
Teleworking centres and other potential management and marketing agents
such as conventional work agencies must create a critical mass and a service
offering which commends itself to the broad mass of customers and prospects.
This places obligations on both brokers and teleworkers alike to subscribe to
a common approach to quality standards. By identifying, defining and
verifying a uniform quality standard, teleworking centres and their
teleworker clients can concentrate on the unique aspects of their offerings,
while their market is extended through a trans-national network system. This
project cannot be achieved at the trans-national level without the
development and support of a reliable, friendly and standards-conformant
communications infrastructure. Here we are not talking about a simple physical
infrastructure or application, but about an integrated service
infrastructure. This is not being achieved effectively with the mixture of
technologies in use in the teleworking sector today, and it is the reason for
proposing the project.
The Rural Telework module of ARC will demonstrate such a system, which
will be prepared by enhancing existing service management and network systems
and integrating several communications applications with security and
multimedia components. This will be validated through pilot user experiments
in several countries, and finally rolled out as a mainstream demonstrator,
integrating all initial trials into a European and North American Teleworking
brokerage and marketing service. The obvious candidates for managing the
service are the more innovative teleworking networks and centres in Europe
and across the Atlantic, and these, together with their teleworker and
marketing connections, form the core of the TELEMART consortium. TELEMART is
a two year project, the portion of the project that will be integrated with ARC
represents the needs assessment, specification and prototyping elements
of the service, along with some initial validation tasks.
Performance Targets and Expected Results
This work will demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of an integrated
service infrastructure for rural telework.
Development Team and Project Participants
The development team for this module will be led by Fast Forward
Technologies Inc. Organizations that will participate in and contribute to
this module include:
- Clarenville Telematics Strategy - Clarenville, Newfoundland
- Eastern Regional College - Clarenville, Newfoundland
- Centre for Innovative Telematics Applications - Clarenville, Newfoundland
- The TELEMART Consortium, consisting of:
- Cork Teleworking Centre - Ireland
- Cobalt Trade Relations AB - Sweden
- Octacon Ltd. - United Kingdom
- Telecottages Wales - Wales
- Zeus - Greece
- Telergos - France
Other ARC Alliance members will participate in the development of this
module, as required, based on relevant module linkages or overlaps.
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