Indeed, some of HP CIO Randall Mott's corporate IT peers said that he probably had no choice but to curb telecommuting because of what he's trying to accomplish at the IT vendor. Mott is consolidating more than 85 data centers into six facilities, creating an enterprise data warehouse to give end users a centralized view of data and overhauling the way the company manages IT projects.

Telecommuting by large numbers of employees works best when there are "tried and true" processes in place, not when a company is heading in new IT directions, said Stephen Pickett, CIO at Penske Corp. in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and president of the Chicago-based Society for Information Management.

SIM has studied the effectiveness of far-flung IT teams and has found that remote workers "can be as productive as people in the office," according to Pickett. Moreover, he said, tapping workers scattered around the globe to take part in a project can be advantageous "because you get the benefit of having multiple cultures attacking the problem."

But the situation at HP isn't ideal for telecommuting, Pickett added. "By taking 85 of anything and making it six, you are dealing with new practices," he said. "And until those are established and people understand and feel comfortable with them, you can't afford to experiment."

Mott said at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in March that HP had too many teleworkers within IT and that he planned to reduce the number of people working outside the office in an attempt to foster better teamwork internally. Last week, he said in an interview that the policy change HP has now implemented affects "multiple hundreds" of IT employees, who in some cases may have to relocate because the company is also reducing the total number of its IT facilities from about 100 to 25. Mott added that more than 100 workers in the IT organization will still be able to telecommute and that the changes don't affect HP's flex-time work policies, which remain available to all IT staffers.