The morning drive. The politics. The gossip. That annoying guy or gal down the hall. The same four earth-tone-blue, fabric-covered cubicle walls day in and day out. There are so many things to hate about the office.

The office should be -- and always has been -- about people. People communicating, collaborating, and integrating their unique skills. How did we ever get locked into those four walls in the first place?

Contract Professional All Star Jason Cohen, a 33-year-old Oracle DBA and developer from Huntington, N.Y., is breaking down the office walls in his "virtual office" consulting company, Webspedite.

The virtual office business approach allows Cohen to offer a full range of consulting services, including technical consulting, Web hosting, creative design, Web advertising, and an assortment of packaged software products, without the overhead and four walls of the larger consulting firms. The virtual office, he says, offers the benefits of bigness and the speed and flexibility of smallness. "There is strength in numbers. The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts," Cohen says of the benefits of collaborating with other free agents. "Besides, you can only take on so much work by yourself. You can only be in one place at a time."

Cohen says potential clients find him through referrals from his collaborative partners or through FreeAgent.com. If he doesn't have the skills they're looking for, he can still take on the technical requirements by bringing in collaborative help. "We partner with each other, and to the prospective client, we look like one company. We create a virtual company and pull all of our skills under one umbrella."

The bottom line to the virtual office approach, he says, "is that the client doesn't get shuffled around. Clients just don't want that anymore. They want one point of contact that can take care of all their needs."

The concept itself, partnering with others who share a complementary market interest, is nothing new. The Japanese have been forming "keiretsus" at the corporate level for decades. The Gartner Institute forecasts that by 2004, 60 percent of IT contractors will participate in some form of a free-flowing, flexible, virtual office where they will band and disband according to the demands of the marketplace.

Cohen has been consulting for the better part of 10 years, the last three as an independent through his company. He specializes in project management, Oracle 7 and 8i administration, PL/SQL development, object-oriented architecture, and PowerBuilder development and instruction. He brings on other consultants as needed, sometimes as employees of Webspedite and sometimes in 1099 arrangements, to leverage their skills and package their combined expertise to deliver added business value.

Raised in Brooklyn before moving to Florida at age 10, Cohen wasn't introduced to IT as a career until he met his future wife, Ellen. "She was a COBOL programmer. I remember her showing me what she did for a living. It looked like Russian to me, but it sparked my interest." Working at the time as a maintenance and HVAC man at a Tampa apartment complex, Cohen recalls it didn't take much coaxing to get out of the 90-degree heat and into computer science classes to earn his associate's degree.

After COBOL programming for three years, in 1994 Cohen landed a contract in Fort Wayne, Ind., to assist in converting a company's sales application from a mainframe platform to client/server. The client/server environment consisted of PowerBuilder 3.0 and Oracle 7.0. He served as project lead on the "pricing" portion of the application, developing the application, modifying Oracle tables, views, indexes, and procedures as needed, and managing two other consultants. "I viewed that contract as paying my client/server dues," Cohen says. "But I knew then that that was where I wanted my career to go."

He returned briefly to permanent employment in 1995 in Tampa as a project leader, rewriting a mission-critical insurance case tracking system using Oracle 7.1, PowerBuilder 4.0, PowerTool, Erwin, and PVCS. The company lost its CEO in the middle of the project and, as often happens in the traditional office place, the new political climate stopped development in its tracks. Ironically, Cohen was brought back on as a consultant in 1997 to finish the project, which became known as CaseMan. He estimates the OLTP-based docketing system for insurance claims increased the company's productivity by 30 percent.

The success of the project, he says, hinged on understanding the client's business. "Through JAD [Joint Application Development] sessions we learned how they do their work and all the business rules involved. Then we developed the software so they could do that work as efficiently as possible."

Explaining business rules and procedures is often glossed over or completely ignored by many clients, Cohen says. "Most of my clients hire me to complete a project by a certain date. The pressure to complete the project by that certain date causes the project manager to lose sight of the need for the consultant to first understand the business. In order for a company to fully gain the benefits from hiring a consultant, that company must make time to teach the consultant their business strategy, goals, and philosophies," he says. "If not, they risk having a product developed that does not meet their requirements."

Since going independent, Cohen and his wife have moved back to New York to be near family and friends. He actively markets products and services offered by Webspedite, partnering with vendors and other IT professionals as needed. One such product, TransferEase, a PowerBuilder application that automates the college transfer credit evaluation process, is marketed through trade shows, trade magazines, and the help of a 1099 partner. Harold Horton, a former registrar for Franklin University in Ohio, was brought on, Cohen says, to bring added credibility in marketing the product. He is looking into a possible partnership with another company that offers PowerBuilder-based application modules targeted for colleges and universities. The TransferEase product has been purchased by five colleges and 50 to 60 others are showing interest, Cohen says.

Since the virtual office has no corporate hierarchy, trust is key to its success, Cohen says. "Trust in other consultants is a must. No one should partner with someone they do not trust. Besides trust, you need a clear understanding of the other consultants' skill sets, needs, and goals. It's sort of like a Wal-Mart always knowing what their inventory consists of. By knowing this, you can better serve your customers' needs. You also need a constant connection to the Internet. Because it is a virtual office, we communicate via e-mail all the time. The phone is hardly used."

Cohen is currently consulting as an Oracle 8i DBA for Adecco Staffing, Inc., in New York, building a staging database before the company's data is loaded into Olsten's systems. He is studying for Oracle OCP certification. "Being a consultant gives me more flexibility and choices than if I were a full-time employee," Cohen asserts. "I control my own benefits, salary, and vacation. In some cases, I control my own work schedule. I don't have the stress of always questioning the stability of my company. I don't have to get involved in the politics that occur in a corporation. I am also in full control of my career path. I don't have to stick with the technologies that the company has chosen. I just choose which skills I want to have and then find a client who has a need for those skills."

Thomas Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, said in his 1998 prognostication "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy" that "business organizations are, in essence, mechanisms for coordination." The coordinating technologies of the 21st century have the power to render the old nine-to-five office obsolete.

The power to break down walls. There are so many things to love about the virtual office. If you want, you can even take a morning drive, talk politics, gossip...maybe get to know that interesting guy or gal down the hall.