Staff Announcement

We are sad to announce, that after many years of hard work and dedication, Paul and Gary, two of the original members of the Wired Workplace team have moved onto pastures new.

Wired Workplace would like to thank Paul and Gary for all of their hard work over the years, and wish them all the best in their new jobs. 

At the same time, we would like to welcome a new member of staff; Nigel Bradley, who will be working with the support team. 

If you would like to join the Wired Workplace team, visit www.wiredworkplace.net/about-us/careers.php to find out about the opportunities available!

Virtual Enterprise Structures

Call centres
IP telephony has been gaining ground in Call Centres for some time. The trend towards offshoring, virtual call centres (where calls are routed between multiple locations) and home working has accelerated this trend. Much traffic going offshore is converted to IP to enable more efficient use of international trunk capacity and the ability to integrate telephony into other applications makes it a good fit for this type of usage. Datamonitor believes that IP telephony will become mainstream in the Call Centre market over the next four to five years although much of this growth will come in ”Greenfield” deployments. However, even allowing for legacy upgrades, they predict that IP shipments will reach parity with TDM by 2008. A key development in this deployment is the migration to virtual and smaller call centres, especially where there is a premium on individual service and higher levels of sophistication. This is especially true in the knowledge economy sector which itself accounts for 8.4 m workers or 30% of the total working population. The overall market for call centres is estimated by the DTI to reach 1m agents in the UK by 2007,

The traditional way of delivering call centres is to build a structure dedicated to this function and specifically designed for this type of working (heavy telecoms and IT infrastructure and open “cube” layout floor plans). Staff are recruited on a permanent basis, often from the unskilled unemployed, and trained in house. This makes the model attractive for areas of significant unemployment, especially where traditional industries have failed and where grants are available for new ventures. As workers become bored with the repetitive and stressful nature of the work and acquire enough skills to be attractive to another call centre operator they move jobs creating a significant staff turnover problem. As we reach effective full employment staff become harder and harder to recruit further stressing the model and driving more outsourcing of call centre operations. Quite a high percentage of this work is now outsourced to specialist operators who can use best practice to bring down costs. The problem is that demand is uneven during the working day and due to the permanent employment pattern of many centres resources are under-utilised driving a high implied cost. This in turn causes many operators, both in house and outsourced, to look at sending work overseas to where the employment costs are lower. The problem with this approach is that it addresses only one part of the equation, cost of delivery staff. In fact, facility and technology costs remain much the same and management overheads may actually rise.

The most effective way of trunking telephony traffic out to an offshore call centre is using Voice over IP. With this leg of the IP infrastructure already in place, resistance to Voice over IP at the edge is reduced.

In the US, where the backlash against offshoring is strongest, operators are increasingly looking at Voice over IP as a way of routing traffic intelligently to self-employed homeworkers. There are a number of advantages to this model:

• Staff are more highly motivated as they control what and who they work for.
• Staff are only paid when they work helping peak hour coverage and preventing expensive low activity periods
• No need for expensive specialist buildings
• Network based recruitment and management keeps overheads low
• Work can be directed into rural areas which is attractive to government
• Reduced commuting lowers stress and emission based pollution
• Work is available for people who are house bound due to disability, age or caring responsibilities

Whilst training costs can be higher with this model early indications are that it can deliver higher quality than traditional models at a cost equivalent to or lower than offshoring. It also is attractive from a societal and governmental perspective and reduces balance of payment pressure on the economy.

The applications to support the home or remote worker are examined in more detail in the following section and this issue will be revisited in some detail in the paper “Teleworking and Virtual Call Centres”.

Flexible working
As the pace of work increases (and with it stress), employees are asserting their desire for a better work/life balance through improved flexibility. This has a number of manifestations, all of which are simplified or enabled through a combination of VoIP and Wireless technology,

Mobility. Work is becoming less and less office based. The impact of globalisation and reduced timescales drives a greater need for speed of response. This results in an “always on, always available” mindset where there are very few circumstances in which we are not available. Mobile phones have either poorly or expensively addressed the issues of data connectivity. Wireless technology addresses the cost and quality of the data connection and as a result provides an alternative conduit for voice communications.

Home working. As most Western societies reach full employment, many people who would not normally be part of the workforce, for reasons of age, disability, childcare etc. are being lured back into work by the opportunity to work from home. By contrast the “always on, always available” culture drives a need to work from home at evenings and weekends even for the full time employed,

Relationship Capital and Social Networks
Although these topics will be covered in more detail in a later paper it is worth considering them briefly here. If work becomes less office-centric, how certain social benefits that office work delivers are to be replaced needs to be considered.

How people work together in these new flexible structures is dependent in large part upon how well they communicate and collaborate. If some of the face to face communication opportunities that occur casually in the working day are no longer available, thought needs to be given to other ways that these can be delivered. The alternative may be more and more formal meetings and a likely drop in productivity. Formal communications can be managed remotely through email and telephone calls but these do not always deliver the flexibility that the casual encounter provides,

The growth of online social networks to replace these face to face interactions has been one of the most remarkable phenomena of the last few years. Broadband has in part enabled this with people dipping in and out of these networks almost as “breaks” in the working day. Although this has been most marked in the micro and self employed sector these tools are perfectly valid for anyone who works on their own.

visit www.wiredworkplace.net/voip.php for more information

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.

Work is what you do, not where you go

The trend towards home working is indisputable and technology advances are making mobile working, historically a challenge, even easier than in the past. In fact there are a whole slew of terms which are often used interchangeably that reflect a radical shift in how we approach work:

• Hot-desking. The idea that your desk is not your permanent domain and that desks can be shared by people who are not office based, on an as and when basis. Commonly used where home or mobile working is standard to provide facilities when those people who are not office based need office facilities
• Home-working. The ability to work from home as opposed to an office most suits those sorts of job that are phone and computer centric. Of course there are all sorts of other home working but our concern here is as an alternative to office based working
• Mobile working. The ability to access office type facilities while on the move. Covers the use of laptop computers and mobile phones and other mobile devices.

Using flexible working techniques is often referred to as “virtualising” a business. One of the key drivers in virtualising a business is to reduce the dependence on permanent office space and thereby to reduce fixed overheads. With many businesses needing to flex their workforce up and down with project and contract staff it is becoming difficult to predict the need for office space and manage the cost of buildings.

As a result, businesses need communications capabilities that reflect their increasing need for operational flexibility. Put simply, the traditional office-centric view of how businesses work, and how communications services are delivered, no longer fits the increasing drive towards mobility and the need to drive down fixed costs. There was a time when flexibility was expensive. Now it can bring even lower cost.

Market resistance to overseas call centres is pushing a re-examination of call centre technology with a trend towards considering virtual call centres enabled by cheaper high speed broadband and IP telephony. A virtual call centre relies on home workers to deliver services and use a network centric management model to provide the support and infrastructure. It has all of the additional secondary benefits of other forms of home working

At a personal level managers and employees want increasing flexibility in how they do their work. 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 longer working hours, stress and health problems. Increasing stress in the workplace is leading to changes in the way people view work. Workers desire more flexibility and control over their work/life balance. People who work from home tend to be much more productive and experience lower levels of stress.

Beyond the organisational and personal benefits there are a number of societal benefits in home working which should not be under estimated.

With 20% of the working population in parts of South Yorkshire on invalidity benefit, home working can deliver a soft return to work and enables carers, women returners to work, retirees and the disabled access to working opportunities. Retirees are likely to find that pension provisions don’t deliver the quality of life they want and so part time home working is an alternative that delivers a good return on their efforts. From an employers perspective all of these groups constitute untapped pools of skilled resources that were historically difficult to unlock and go some way to filling the skills gap.

You don’t have to spend long driving around the main towns in South Yorkshire to figure out that traffic congestion is on the increase. Many people are increasingly seeking home-working and flexible working patterns as a method for improving productivity and quality of life. Time spent commuting is stressful and unproductive and leads to long working days and a reduction in quality of home life.

From an environmental perspective the Government wants to meet environmental targets and has set goals for its own “virtual enterprise” initiatives. Commuting is a soft target in this battle and despite increased focus on public transport, total bus journeys continue on a downward trend in South Yorkshire. The truth is people do not easily give up their cars. There is also an implied exclusion process where non-drivers find it increasingly difficult to reach out of town workplaces and home working can improve all of these areas.

The value of home and remote working is clear. Now, what can technology do to simplify and enable it?

The pervasive availability of cheap broadband is a key enabler. In a compressed geographic area like South Yorkshire virtually all areas have access to broadband and often a choice between cable and DSL delivered formats. This creates a competitive environment and further reduces costs. The Digital Region project seeks, over a number of years, to improve the availability of higher capacity, higher quality broadband over fibre optic cables so performance should continue on an upward trend. This in turn enables new powerful applications that enable improved collaboration, often a criticism of remote working. The ability to work in teams on common data using sophisticated networking tools reduces the isolation sometimes experienced by home and remote workers. Video and voice conferencing enables home workers to set up virtual meeting spaces dynamically and can even create an online chat environment to replace the kitchen conversation.

IP based telephone services enable workers to control multiple devices and locations and route calls to home handsets or mobiles without creating confusion in customers and callers. Outside callers call the same number or extension and the call is routed to suit working patterns. Outbound calls can be sent with a consistent number so that it creates the feeling of always being available in one place.

On the mobile front, the improved range of mobile devices such as the Blackberry further reduce the reliance on traditional office space and improve the responsiveness with smaller businesses benefiting disproportionately. The new ranges of mobile devices are, for the first time, really useable as email, web and phone handsets with decent screens, keyboards, performance and battery life

One issue to bear in mind with all of this flexibility, of course, is the issue of data security. If users create and store information offline from the company’s main server network this can create issues around multiple copies and security. Portable devices are easily lost, damaged or stolen and it’s more important than ever to have a useable backup strategy that ensures that key business information is protected and copied to a safe location. New applications can allow this to happen automatically so that the user’s laptop or other device backs itself up as soon as it goes online, and such services are very affordable.

Home working and mobile working is now a useable reality for all types of businesses. Technology has caught up with people’s desire to have an improved work/life balance. The potential for improving performance, saving money and improving efficiency is clear.

visit www.wiredworkplace.net for more information about remote working!

Email archiving

Did you know you have a legal obligation to retain emails with commercially sensitive content for 7 years? What do you do at the moment? Would you be interested in a service that automates and simplifies this so that you have secure backed up files in case you need them?

Hosted applications

Wired Workplace, through the SYDC, is going to launch a range of subscription based application services targeted at businesses, initially in South Yorkshire. The idea is that using hosting reduces cost of ownership and provides a more secure and efficient environment for applications than doing it yourself. Does this appeal? Which applications? Have you any previous experience of hosted application services or SaaS (software as a service)? Can you rate the following as key factors?

• Ease of implementation
• Ease of use
• Performance
• Range of applications
• Quality of support
• Cost

visit www.wiredworkplace.net/hosting.php for more about the hosting services that we offer!

Green data centres

What's the level of interest in green data centres and what do they have to have to be useful? Carbon neutral status or better? Can you improve your carbon footprint by moving servers out of the office into a data centre. What's best practice in eco-efficient data centres?

Data centre progress

Having taken possession of the new data centre just over a week ago work progresses apace on fitting out the first floor. Air con is complete, UPS and generator have been delivered and most of the electrical work is near complete. The racks are being delivered today and we should be up and running by the end of the month as targeted.

Recovering after disaster strikes!

When you were doing your business continuity plan did you allow for the toilets backing up and six inches of smelly sludge over everything? Did you figure that even if you were not badly affected you still wouldn’t be allowed back in to the building for up to a week? Did you realise that the basement would be flooded for three weeks and even if you pumped it out it would fill up again?

Just some of the questions you might have asked BEFORE the recent flooding in South Yorkshire. Now it might just be too late.

Steve Wragg, Chair of ICT Yorkshire, reckons 40% of businesses affected by the floods could take a year to recover, and one in five will fail.

IT will not be at the root of all those business failures but in a previous survey the London Chamber concluded that 70% of businesses that had a significant data loss were likely to fail within 18 months.

IT is at the centre of so many businesses nowadays with online trading over the Internet one of the fastest growing sectors. And with increased pressure from regulation to protect your customers’ data, the job of securing and protecting that data is becoming even more critical.

“We knew there was a flood warning, but when the police came round and said that they strongly recommended we evacuate, we knew it was probably time to go. We put everything that was on the floor up on the desks and headed out as fast as we could. As the last person left the office, he saw the River Don burst its banks and the water started pouring across the car park.”

This was the scene at Helen of Troy’s offices on Brightside Lane on the afternoon of June 25th, as recalled by international marketing manager Andrew Deane. The next morning, staff returned to survey the damage.

“Our office is a corner building, so the river had come in at speed and then swirled around. Furniture had been washed up against the doors and we had to push it out the way in order to get in. Inside, we could see that the water had risen over the tops of the desks and everything was covered in two inches of mud and debris.”

Helen of Troy is a global company and a leading manufacturer of personal care and well-being products. Its UK operation was established in Sheffield in 1995 and has expanded to international offices in France, Brazil, Shenzen and Hong Kong. Its product lines include licensed brands such as Vidal Sassoon, Scholl and Toni & Guy. The company now employs 40 people in Sheffield and has a total global turnover of $635 million.

The Sheffield offices act as the heart of the international operation and are also linked to the head office in the United States. The company’s IT and telephone systems are therefore crucial to the running of the business.

“Luckily, all but two of our servers survived the water and our backup tapes were also functional. This meant that we had everything except the previous week’s work. However, what we didn’t have was somewhere for people to work and the ability to connect with the outside world. The Sheffield office is the distribution hub for the international offices so we needed to get our sales order processing systems functioning quickly. Our top priority was to find premises and get an office up and running as fast as possible.”

The company turned to The Quadrant on the Parkway Business Park, which provides managed office space for a variety of businesses. “We had heard that The Quadrant had space so we set up a meeting for first thing in the morning and took first refusal on everything they had available. With prices for office space going up by the minute, we quickly decided that The Quadrant offered the best combination of quality accommodation and good value. And, importantly, they had an IT partner who could move quickly to set up broadband connections for our phones and computers.”

The Quadrant’s communications and IT partner is The Wired Workplace, which provides the centre’s tenants with the choice of a full range of information and communication technology services.

“The Wired Workplace experts were in touch with us within hours and they worked closely with our IT manager to make sure they could meet our specifications. We had a fully functioning IT system within a day and our sales order processing was operational by Thursday evening.”

The staff of Helen of Troy are now settled in The Quadrant, where they will stay until the Brightside Lane offices are refurbished. Meanwhile, managers have had time to reflect on some of the lessons learned from their experience.

Andrew Deane says, “One of the key questions I would ask now is, ‘How much paper do you really need to keep in your business?’. Once water gets to it, the recovery process is expensive and slow. I would say, think before you file it and, if you really need it, reassess again six months down the track. There are plenty of approved electronic document systems available, so store it electronically if you can.

“The other thing I would say is never underestimate your team – it is incredible what people are capable of doing when the situation demands it. An event like this shows the best side of people and you get to see the impact of a group team effort.”

Many people back up their data but have you checked whether you can recover it from the copy?

“In our experience most people never check that their backups work or test their ability to recover their data from those backups. Coupled with a large number keeping the backups on site, your backup is quite likely to be useless. Even if the backup is in a safe its not much use to you if you cant get onsite” said Steve Wragg

While larger businesses and the public sector may have detailed plans, smaller businesses mostly don’t.
When the floods hit Business Link’s offices in both Sheffield and Rotherham one of the key issues was keeping staff informed of progress.

“People need to know whether they should report to another office or work from home. Is there somewhere else where they can get access to basic office facilities? Where can you hold meetings? Can phone calls be re-routed to mobiles? These were all basic queries that needed answering and the information circulated to staff,” said Steve

A disaster like the floods gets plenty of media attention but every day businesses have broken pipes and fires. Equipment fails and people lose things. Laptops and mobile phones get stolen from the back seats and boots of cars.

Have you got an emergency or business continuity plan? Have you ever done a risk assessment? What does your insurance really cover you for?

What have you learnt from other people’s expensive experiences?