The drivers for changing working practices

Quality of life
One of the drivers behind changing working practices is a desire to work to live rather than live to work. Because the guarantees that were implied in people’s relationship with work have been broken they increasingly seek to achieve a better balance between work and life. The pace of change and the speed at which business is conducted have accelerated over the last 20 years to such a degree that people are now routinely experiencing some of the demerits of all this, especially longer working hours, stress and health problems. Many people are now realising they need to exercise some control over the impact work has on their lives and are using flexible working practices to do this.

Commuting and the environment
The relationship between commuting and pollution is clear and government is encouraging the trend to break up accepted working patterns in favour of spreading the traffic load to reduce pollution.

The pension gap and downshifting
Many people realise that the pension system is unlikely to provide them with the support and the lifestyle they want and so people are going to carry on working for longer, although increasingly on a flexible basis in terms of time and location. Business systems need to track and reflect this to enable these types of working to be supported. Historically office phone systems, with their static paper-based directories, made this kind of flexibility difficult to achieve. The newer applications positively facilitate this. Correspondingly many people wish to reduce the stress they experience by downshifting their work, often to a more rural and homeworking basis.

Financial drivers
IP telephony and Wireless LANs enable greater flexibility without the fixed costs of traditional wired LANs and PBX’s. People’s relationship with their handsets change and in many cases a PC client is perfectly suited to how they want to work, removing this cost element entirely. With the ability to redirect traffic to wherever someone appears on the network, you no longer need to schedule desks or physical locations. Many large companies such as BT have been able to reduce their investment in property and fixed IT infrastructure by adopting these flexible working practices. There was a time when flexibility was expensive. Now it can bring even lower cost. Over time smaller businesses, who often have a more direct relationship with costs, (especially where they are owner managed) will seek this flexibility and functionality from their telecommunications and IT infrastructure

Cost drivers for the small business
Small businesses are often driven by sensitivity to cost or by a desire to grow their businesses, or some mixture of the two. VoIP is likely to become quickly adopted as it brings services such as international teleconferencing into the reach of the smaller business and goes one more step to breaking down the geographical boundaries that often hold back the smaller business. Globalisation will become an issue not just for larger businesses. The ability to get all (or at least a portion) of “on net” calls free of charge is compelling. It is interesting to note that what “on net” means will also change as operators seek to make their boundaries more visible and thereby encourage their clients to bring more of their regular contacts “inside the rope”. Word of mouth (or Friend of a Friend as it is sometimes called) has always been the most powerful marketing tool. “On net” encourages the customer to bring people onto the network to reduce their own costs and VoIP is a powerful tool in delivering this, especially for the competitive carriers. The higher percentage of regular contacts that are “on net” the smaller the billed cost will be. In fact VoIP changes the overall billing model from “calls and lines” to a combination of personal subscriptions, some free calls and some charged calls. This is a huge change for the telecommunications industry and organisations should expect to see the sort of bundling and packaging that is currently endemic in the mobile industry coming into the “fixed” network as operators seek to press a competitive advantage through price based differentiation. One of the casualties of such a change is customer loyalty with people changing to take advantage of new packages and tariffs.

Competition in the telecoms market
One of the dynamic factors driving the development of the market for VoIP in general is the support of the carriers. For BT, VoIP is both a defence and a “win back” opportunity; they see the need to ensure that their new IP infrastructure (dubbed the 21st Century Network) stretches right to the edge in order to fend off the competition of alternative carriers. With such a high percentage of revenues (and an even higher percentage of profit and cash generation) accounted for by voice traffic, BT cannot afford to stand still. These alternative carriers, in turn, see VoIP as a method for changing the voice business model to the detriment of the incumbents (BT) market share. For them the business is to be won rather than defended and VoIP offers them the opportunity to keep traffic away from the BT network and under their cost control. Cable and Wireless, Kingston and Colt have all launched Voice over IP strategies with C&W refocusing its efforts on the SME marketplace.