In a recent article in Irish Computer, we recounted a number of stories of channel and industry figures struggling against the snow and icy roads to get into work or into meetings. You might think it would be difficult not to spot the irony in the situation of one individual battling the elements to attend a meeting with a number of resellers to talk about virtualisation, cloud computing and managed services. Given the hype around increased mobility and flexible working, it might have struck readers from outside the industry as slightly odd that those who are so keen to extol the benefits of technology in advancing the cause of mobile working appeared so desperate to attend face to face meetings in such horrible weather conditions.
Mary Bradshaw, managing director at Damovo Ireland, can understand why they might be puzzled. “I was aghast at how many people went to work,” she says. While much of the company’s business involves servicing customers and looking after their communications networks, Bradshaw was adamant that she didn’t want people coming to work. “I didn’t want anybody on the road when they didn’t need to be. People had staff driving three hours in the snow, risking their cars and risking themselves. Why?” In Damovo’s case only two or three people went into the office, everyone else worked remotely. Bradshaw says she never worked as hard in her life as she did at home during the week of the snow. It’s not as if it’s particularly complicated to set up a decent remote access system. All you need is a laptop, a secure IP address, broadband connection and VPN access to give an employee access to anything they would have sitting at a desk at work. “If the technology is there,” Bradshaw asks, “why are there so many people clogging up the M50 every morning? Why do so many of us still talk about going to work? To me, work is not a place, it’s something I do.” Crosshead: Anywhere access
Francis O’Haire, technical director at Data Solutions, says we shouldn’t discount the importance of face to face meetings but he agrees with Bradshaw that the technology isn’t exactly bleeding edge. “We put nothing in place internally to facilitate it [working remotely during the bad weather] but the systems were there for other reasons and the cherry on the top was that we could work like that.” He stresses that it’s important to ensure the IT and telephony parts of the equation are addressed to give continuity across both for remote workers. And there’s a bigger picture than the weather here. “It was put in place for bigger reasons than the week or two a year when you can’t make it into the office. These are the soft benefits of desktop virtualisation and communications. Inherently it brings a level of continuity and disaster recovery – we call it workforce continuity.” To O’Haire, it’s important to think of this in terms of how a company manages its desktops as a whole where “anywhere access” is a part of it “but you’ve got to look at the bigger picture in terms of your entire desktop strategy.” Crosshead: Breaking the dependence
Unsurprisingly, Kevin Bland, UK & Ireland channel director at Citrix (which is distributed by Data Solutions), concurs. “It’s not about necessarily putting in place a disaster recovery process,” he says. Instead, it can be part of a company’s desktop strategy. When the time comes to address its estate of devices and upgrade the operating systems deployed, a desktop virtualisation strategy can help to break the dependence on location and device. And while some partners have deployed a “very specific message during times of bad weather” and sold technology on the back of it, Bland is fairly clear that “it won’t be weather conditions or something like swine flu that will change this. It will be a combination of looking back at those challenges, while trying to address the strategic challenge in terms of how get the desktop to their users.” On a practical level, he adds, it’s also important to get companies to adopt more flexible working and remove the connection between someone having to be in the office if they’re working. Otherwise, they will always be restricted. Companies need to look at the contracts they have and how they employ their workers. They should address flexible working as something people in the workforce really value.
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