The Ultimate Escape

Well it’s all over for this one and it’s been a great ride. Aside from meeting some great people and getting out of Sydney for a week we’ve also had a great insight into some of the different ways people use office style technology away from a traditional office environment.

To a large degree as natural mobile workers I think none of this has come as much of a surprise to us, we’ve found a few new ways to do things and some great new tools, but the essence is "this is tuff we already know and do". So our focus has been on reverse engineering our own developed skills, tools and methods to help others to add remote working to their life in a way that makes them more efficient and helps to make work a more family friendly environment.

The Mobile worker

These people comprise everything from sales staff, support staff through to travelling executives. The key factor for them is that they are away from the office as part of their normal daily activities, this is not new for them. What they need is access to the tools required for the to be productive.

From a management perspective there is no argument, a sales person has to go on the road, and exec has to go to certain meetings etc. So convincing the senior management that there is need for tools to facilitate their activities is all about ROI and picking the right tools for the job, be it a hand held device, corporate VPN or Live Communication Server for Exchange.

The Remote Worker

Remote workers (if that is the best term) can be defined as people who’s job naturally falls in line with a standard office environment but for whatever reason they need to work away. This may be because they are a recent parent, they have an injury or simply because their company has set up a small remote office that doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a full set of required tools.

These people need to communicate with colleagues and use tools in a way that doesn’t impact negatively on either their own or their colleagues productivity. They also need to use the same tools or at least ones that are very compatible with those used by the rest of the office.

This can be a difficult decision at times for management. In the case of a small regional office  the business drivers are clear, the only remaining task is to define the technologies that will facilitate their job. Some of the big ones are:

• Citrix or Terminal services for remote desktop connectivity.
• VPNs for secure access to internal resources
• Link optimisation technologies such as Riverbed
• Mobile Internet and productivity tools
• Remote access for Office tools, CRMs and Groupware

However with other remote workers the business case can be a difficult one to make I’ll be discussing this in more depth in my next post.

The Small Business Owner

Small businesses are an interesting creature in that they thrive on innovation and in large part have a requirement for tools to be available away from a traditional office environment. Often  such facilities are not available, or in most cases the owner simply has to spend time away from the office building business, servicing customers or on the job. As such they are often the early adopters of technologies that facilitate a more flexible work environment, mobile phones are a great example. The key point for a small business person is that the technology has to pay for itself relatively quickly (ROI) and actually using the technology has to be simple and consistent.

Having run a small business myself for some years now I can tell you there is nothing more distracting and destructive to the good running of a business than unreliable tools.

One of the great things that has come out of this experience is an overview of some of the great business enablers that are available now for small groups. Two that come to mind are hosted Exchange with Office Communication Server and hosted CRM, between these applications you have just about everything you need to run a business. With sales, marketing, account management, service management, Email, contacts …..  the list goes on. The short short version is that small businesses now have access to tools that were sole province of the large corporates in the past and with the level that mobile technology has progressed to, implementing these tools is relatively painless and surprisingly reliable.