collaboration

Does your job entail working with other people, many of whom you don't see regularly - partners, customers, contractors, and geographically dispersed colleagues? Do you get your work done not only in the office, but also at home, on an airplane, and on-site with your customers? If so, then you understand the essence of the 'virtual office'.

No matter the size of the organisation, people are seeking better ways to cope with the changing nature of work. Traditionally, your 'office' is where you keep important files, where you work at your desk, and where you meet and work with others on important tasks. These days, however, the 'virtual office' is increasingly wherever you and your wireless laptop happen to be.

The impact of virtual office work is amplified when it begins to affect not only personal productivity, but also team and organisational efficiency and effectiveness.

People work with other people all the time. It may not always seem like team work. For most people, it is just work. The ability to connect with colleagues - to share ideas, conduct analyses, ask and answer questions, make decisions, and track and manage deliverables - is just the way work gets done. But as the virtual office becomes the norm, it has become more difficult for loosely defined teams to connect.

Virtual office work is stressing the seams of business technology infrastructure. Consider the following symptoms of daily work:

Month-long set up times to provide a shared work area for teams of people, including external participants
No integral support for users who are occasionally disconnected from any network
Arduous VPN setup and usage procedures for internal workers who use it as a last resort
Painful bandwidth issues when connecting from a dial-up, or "communications challenged" environment
Clogged email inboxes due to long, multi-attachment email threads used for 'collaboration'

Such personal inconveniences lead to team inefficiencies and organisation ineffectiveness. Below are three examples of routine business activities that are challenged in a virtual office setting.

Geographically Separated Teams

Global manufacturers often have established processes to support increasingly global customers and dealer networks. Work occurs across floors, buildings, geographies, business functions and companies. Subject matter experts lend their skills when needed. Project teams span lines of business. Contractors fill expertise gaps on specific projects. These dynamics drive the need for decentralised, virtual work teams that are cross-functional, multi-organisation and often multi-cultural and multi-language. While virtual work provides efficiencies, it can also increase co-ordination costs and erode team cohesion. Basic collaboration tools, such as online team rooms, may exist, but they are not easily extended across offices or organisations. Without an effective virtual office solution, dispersed teams rely on "what works": email and frequent teleconferences. But these tools do not provide the persistent context that virtual teams require, causing delays and confusion. Consequently, in-person meetings are needed to keep teams on the same page, resulting in increased travel expenses. These organisations quickly find that the benefits of virtual work teams can be nullified by productivity declines and increased costs.

Multi-Organisational Teams

Governmental organisations and non-governmental humanitarian organisations (NGOs) frequently operate in environments where there is a deep need for multi-organisational co-ordination and collaboration. In an emergency response situation, for instance, multiple humanitarian organisations may need to pool and share resources - with each other, as well as with governmental organisations - to address the needs of those affected. Not only is the participation of many organisations required, but the operational environment is often harsh and without network connectivity.

These dynamics often lead to a centralised, paper-based approach where field workers assess the environment on paper, take it back to the 'office' and report it back to some centralised command centre before any decisions can be made or action taken. The result is that the sharing of emergency assessment information, pooling of aid resources, and co-ordination of assistance is time-intensive, inefficient, and sometimes impossible.

At the Customer Site Teams

Many workers - consultants, business development professionals, sales and support teams -- are used to doing business in a conference room at the customer site, sometimes for days at a time. While the benefits of co-location are obvious, the effectiveness of those individuals while away from the corporate network is hampered. Sometimes the customer allows the visitor to get on the internal network.

When network connectivity cannot be assumed, the virtual office context has an immediate impact on the effectiveness of remote workers. Technology infrastructures that assume users are desk bound and in the office are not flexible enough to accommodate a shifting operational or business model.

In theory, these problems should not occur. If bandwidth were truly ubiquitous and plentiful, if configuration settings were always right, and if people just behaved in a manner that took into account the systems designed to support them, virtual office work would be seamless. People would be able to work together as if they were all in the same place, no matter where they are.

Who has already done this with us?

Just some of the businesses Ingensys has helped with our blueprint solutions and consultancy:

Effortlessly bring together team members from both inside and outside your company, with no IT assistance required and no need to waste time thinking about firewalls, servers, security, or network access

Get work done faster by always knowing each other's virtual location, or online presence, thus allowing for organic and quick conversation and collaboration.

Bring relevant information together in one place - data, files, messages, edits, forms, meetings, calendars, etc. - for everyone in your team to see. Always work with the same information whether you're online, off-line or on low bandwidth connections.