Ladies and Gentlemen,

To-day, through out Europe, roughly 2 millions people telework.

Telework is indeed constantly increasing.

In France, after experiments during the 2 past years, telework has indeed reached a status of regular work organisation.

Let me first pay a special tribute.

I am particularly proud and happy on behalf of France Télécom to notice that a very small country school of south western France has been selected to provide the illustration used on the common telecard of the major Telecom operators in Europe for promoting the ETW 97.

This elementary cyber-school is now world-wide known through its presence on the web and due to the personal involvement of one of its teachers, Mr Pierre Valade. Mr Valade pioneered in this field, introducing the use of Internet in the school curriculum of his 45 ten years old pupils.

Today’s ceremony gives me also the opportunity to inform you of the active role that France Télécom has taken in the introduction of New Information and Communication Technologies in the Education field in France. And especially in supporting the recent Netdays, another European initiative.

After congratulating Mr Valade, let me now congratulate the European Commission and more specifically DG XIII for its initiative to give a special focus this year to this Telework  week.

We, at France Télécom, are convinced that we have reached the moment for integrating telework in the normal economical and social policies of the corporations throughout Europe.

In the past, telework has been identified with work at home. In fact today, it is demonstrated that a person can execute its work  in multiple locations due to the new technologies: home, office, customers premises, car, hotel, etc.

You know very well the pros (and by the way are there any cons?) of telework. I will not elaborate on those.

I would now like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to present you some information on what we do at France Télécom for our customers and also how we implement telework internally.

Several of our large accounts use telework as a common way of working, fully integrated in their processes. I would have several examples to illustrate my words, but many of the most interesting cases have requested from us not to disclose their name, because they consider telework and the way they have implemented it as a strong competitive advantage. They are in many sectors of the economy, such as electronic industry, chemical, industry, etc.

However I may mention here Philips Eclairage and OLSY (Olivetti). Both have more than 200 salespeople in the field using TeleWork with the most advanced technology. Both have reengineered their processes in order to fully benefit of this new opportunities (portable PC, GSM data, ISDN, Internet, videoconferencing, voicemail, etc.)

We are convinced that small businesses as well as State and local government services should strongly benefit from telework in the future and we anticipate these moves and prepare them actively.

Obviously, we telework also in France Télécom for our own needs.

Several of our local branches operate already in a teleworking mode with tens of sales representatives and this will be extended in 98. Those people use shared offices with advanced technologies such as those I mentioned earlier. Next year they will also access to our INTRANET (we call it INTRANOO) from any France Télécom location or any outside location such as customer premises.

Another example is groupware and especially among the people of information system. One of our Directions in Information Systems is spread over 7 different locations. They share a common knowledge information base, know how, collaborate in commons projects and capitalise their experiences. This group uses a Lotus Notes platform with several servers and an INTRANET access.

Our internal education department uses also intensively those methods for distance education, help-desk, distributed expertise. We are developing very actively help desks for any specific skill and know how in France Télécom at the present time.

In a more conventional field, customers directory inquiries, we have also made an important use of telework. At the present time, more than 40% of all calls are tele-answered. More than 70 % calls from the Paris region are served from locations in the provinces where life is more pleasant, less hectic for our employees, and also office space cheaper.

Adding all cases, we have at the present time, roughly 5000 people teleworking that is to say 3% of our total workforce. Significantly more than the European average.

In summary, I hope I have convinced you that we, at France Télécom, are enthusiastic about telework.  We believe in the future of telework and we seriously invest in the development of this way of working among our customers and internally.

In conclusion, I would like to mention another DG XIII initiative; I refer to the European Telework Charter from the DIPLOMAT project.

We have decided to sign this Charter and we invite all of our partners to sign it also, in order to federate all the individual and corporate efforts at European level to support the advance of this new way of working in the Information Society.

But all of you know that telework is not only about working, it is also about a new way of thinking, of managing people and above all, for the next century, a new way of living.