The Virtual Workplace
e-Infrastructure for e-Business
I remember when I first met Lisa Kimball at the offices of Metasystems Design Group. The space was dominated by a comfortable couch and easy chairs, with no individual offices at all.
“How do you get any privacy?” I asked.
“Privacy for what?” replied Lisa.
“You know, for thinking, reading, writing,” said I.
“Well, if that’s what you’re doing, why wouldn’t you just stay at home
to do it?” Lisa innocently responded.
Of course — how silly of me — why wouldn’t you just stay home? That was 10 years ago, and what was virtually unthinkable then is becoming the norm in companies ranging from four-person travel agencies to Fortune 10 companies such as IBM.
In fact, I usually split my time about 50/50 between home and the office.
"Congregate to collaborate, isolate to concentrate," says Jessica Lipnack, author of "Virtual Teams." And in fact, that's what I'm fortunate enough to be able to do working at Caucus Systems.
Because I’m writing today, I’m working from home. I’m in the sunroom, looking out over my back yard, sunlight streaming in — and occasionally making it a little hard to read the screen of my laptop! Fortunately, my recliner also swivels so I can keep ahead of the glare (yes, I know, I’m a guy — but what can I say?).
I just got a call from Kurt, a Caucus employee who’s in an office upstairs from mine. He asked me to take a look at a PowerPoint presentation he just saved on our common I: drive that he wanted some help with, and I gave him some feedback.
“How about if I come down and we’ll go get some coffee?” he asked.
“Didn’t you know — I’m working from home,” I replied.
Actually, Kurt didn’t know that I wasn’t in the office, because I was present in every way except my body!
When Kurt called, he dialed my usual extension, but from my house, I had told our Altigen digital PBX to forward all calls to my home number — which it did, invisibly. (If my line’s busy, my Bell Atlantic phone messaging system takes a message, just as the Altigen system would if I were in the office.)
But it’s not just the phone — my cable modem provides broadband Internet access, so I’m as tied into our work team as if I were physically in the office. Using the AOL Instant Messaging service, I appear on the “buddy lists” for all Caucus employees, and they can click on my icon for a quick real-time chat or to exchange information.
We have programmed our Windows NT server so that we can map to the I: drive from all of our laptop computers, as long as they’re connected to the Internet. So when Kurt asked me about the PowerPoint file he had just saved, I was able to access it as quickly and as easily as I could from the office.
Of course, I set my email to check for new messages every five minutes, I enter information on new contacts into our common contact management system, and I make appointments into our shared electronic calendar — just as I do from the office — so I am totally “plugged,” as we like to say. And what’s more, no one who doesn’t physically come into my office would know that I’m working from home — I’m as available as I would be at work, and I can get much more writing done!
Worker after worker, in business after business, is replicating my story today. In fact, research by the Gartner group indicates that within a year, 80% of all enterprises will have at least 50% of their knowledge workers engaged in some form of telecommuting or other nomadic work. In fact, Gartner Group goes so far as to suggest that “workplace transformation is a critical management imperative for the connected economy as a key element to attract, retain and enable talented employees, and to reallocate financial resources between physical and digital infrastructure, or between ‘bricks and clicks.’”
The office building today was designed in an earlier industrial age to mimic the assembly lines that made Ford so successful, with individual knowledge workers in offices (or more recently cubicles) arranged in rows. What was a breakthrough in standardizing production was marginally useful for the exchange of information and processing of transactions. In the age before copiers and fax machines, there was an advantage to centralizing workers around the information they were processing.
However, new forces shape new ages, and the forces that affect today's businesses shape the workplace of the 21st century. And what are those forces?
Globalization has led to workforces that are distributed widely across time and space, and the need for ways to effectively collaborate among distributed teams.
The virtual enterprise now consists of alliances across a value chain, with quick-forming, quick-dissolving teams being assembled from different companies that may never meet face to face.
Flex-time and the rapid pace of our work lives have made it harder to meet face to face.
As a result, more and more companies are working with a distributed workforce. IBM, for example, has allowed a large proportion of its U.S. sales force to work entirely from home.
The workplace is no longer an office, and office is no longer a verb. We are officing wherever we have the tools and access to information and people to undertake our work.
Source: Gartner Group
To transform the workplace, a four-step approach is necessary:
- Strategic planning
- Project planning
- Implementation
- Evaluation
I was consulting with a high technology telecommunications company recently about a pilot program to create a virtual workplace infrastructure for its company. Soon after arriving, I asked the internal OD consultant, "What's the driver for this project — why do you want to virtualize?"
“Actually,” he said, “we didn’t plan on virtualizing our workforce. It just sort of happened. One day we looked around and realized that 44% of our employees were not colocated with their managers, and we hadn’t built an infrastructure to support our distributed workforce.”
The first step in successfully implementing an e-business workforce initiative is strategic planning, for as the old saying goes, “good results without good planning come from good luck, not good management.”
There are five critical factors in this strategic planning process.
Sponsorship. It's important that the project have a sponsor at the senior management level who can resource the project and ensure that the project receive not only appropriate funding but also the management support for the new styles of work that will result.
Purpose. The project owners and sponsors must be clear on the purpose of the project, whether it be to save money, attract and retain talent, or improve productivity and the quality of the work products. Think about success criteria as well.
Infrastructure. Choose the tools that you will use in the new virtual workplace and identify the infrastructure required for initial implementation and ongoing support.
Policies. Implement new policies on everything from child care (can a teleworking parent have a toddler in the house?) to evaluation (which will need to change from activity-driven to results-driven).
Budgeting. Comprehensive budgets will need to account for hard costs (e.g., laptop computers for nomadic workers), soft costs (e.g., 24-7 support centers) and facilities savings (e.g., relative costs of dedicated offices vs. hotel space for virtual workers).
Some of the tools that nomadic workers need are obvious, and most IT departments quickly identify them:
- Computer and access to the Internet
- Telephone and fax machines
- Access to corporate data, ERP/CRM/other software
But teleworking is not about connecting people to computers, people to data or people to the network.
“There are two fundamental business processes,” says Tom Mandel, CEO of Mighty Acorn Inc. “Transactional processes are ones that exchange value; conversational processes create value.”
It’s true. As Juanita Brown says, “Conversation is a core business process.” And this is certainly true in the workplace — both face to face and virtually.
Increasingly, knowledge workers perform their functions in teams and workgroups. In a virtual environment, the requirement is the same, but the infrastructure is less clear.
In fact, one of the more interesting decisions that managers responsible for virtual workplace initiatives must consider is the figure/ground problem between information and interaction.
People are increasingly constructing virtual workplaces via corporate portals in which corporate resources are immediately available to the workers when they log in to the corporate intranet with a browser. The question is this: Should data/information/programs be at the center (figural) and communications infrastructure be at the periphery (i.e., a button that says "community" at the side of the screen), or should collaborative tools be at the center, and data/information be at the periphery?
As a psychologist who has worked with teams in virtual space for many years, my strong belief is that the latter is the better solution. Work happens through interaction, collaboration, focused conversations for action. Information only becomes knowledge in the context of these interactions.
What tools are available for this type of virtual workplace? How can you develop a corporate portal with collaboration at the center?
That’s the subject of my next Technology Trends article. Stay tuned, or give me a call at (703) 204-8300 and I’ll send you a copy.