On the under side if productivity and quality declined after VPN deployed because of bottom dwellers and pointless middle management, then no you've just made IT's argument for them - you can't trust the user. If the work at home force was a large enough percentage of the company then you've got access to data on all of it plus business continuation planning points which was a boom market post 911.
100% agree there. Regarding that info, the questions becomes whether or not companies/managers drill down to each individual contributor's performance, or do they just look a the performance of the group/department in question overall? My suspicion is that many will do the latter.
