An Empirical Study on Working from Home : A Popular E-Business Model

Development in information communication and internet technologies shifts the conventional higher education and training system completely into online e-education through global universities. Students get freedom to work and simultaneously study by enrolling online in these global universities. When online education model is considered as next wave in higher education system, we propose an idea of online office model as a new system to support online education model. This paper contains the concept of "Working from Home" a online office back-up system in organizations and its advantages to customers, employees and service providers. Moreover, such model decreases the expenditure for traveling, to have better homely food etc. for the employees and the service provider can decrease expenditure for office space and maintenance. This online office management system serves as back office system present college based education system. This online office functions like conventional office system where it does all functions related to marketing, admission, enrollment, managing online study material download, online attendance, online assignment evaluation management, handling student and faculty queries, supporting examination based evaluation and finally monitoring degree/diploma certificate generation. All these online office functions can be managed and controlled by a team of online office managers working from their homes so that the physical existence of the online global education providers/universities can be totally eliminated. Working from Home system should have characteristics to fulfill its objectives to provide all the required services and to solve all problems of the stakeholders. The characteristics of "Working from Home" e-business model is analyzed using 'ABCD Analysis Technique'. Based on various factors which decides the Working from Home system, a model of various factors affecting under organizational objectives, employers point of view, employees point of view, customers/students point of view, environmental/societal point of view and system requirements are derived by a qualitative data collection instrument namely focus group method. Working from home concept is being analyzed using a new Business Analysis Frame work namely ABCD Technique