Avoid crossed wires
Running an office without technology is virtually impossible these days. But dealing with technology can be pretty hard going, too, finds Kristian Dando.
Incomprehensible jargon, crashed computers with weird error messages, photocopiers that need rebooting – for many, the high-tech office of 2008 is not quite what it should be.
Thousands of gizmos, communications links and software packages offer to help firms more productively. But knowing how to use them can be a time-consuming task.
“Many companies see technology as a necessary evil,” says Sarah Edwards, business development director at Capital Network Solutions in Barry. “But if they embraced it and invested more in it, they would see it can help companies consolidate their resources.”
But she warns: “After the dot com boom, there were a lot of IT companies in Wales. Seemingly anybody who’d had some experience in the sector read a book, decided that they were experts and jumped on the bandwagon. As a result there are a lot of cowboys operating.”
The subsequent crash went some way to sorting the wheat from the chaff by purging less credible companies. But there is still a tendency for technology companies to blind the lay community with science, and, consequently, for clients not to ask the right questions.
“Companies can bombard people who aren’t informed with jargon and acronyms,” says Edwards. “And for whatever reason – usually for fear of being perceived to be ill-informed – they go along with it. The truth is that most companies aren’t interested in how their technology works. They just want results.
“We’re forever going to clients that have been oversold solutions or have systems in place that are completely inappropriate for their needs – shambolic networks, which are just hanging together by threads.”
together by threads.” For the majority of Wales’ executive community, the Filofax – that staple of the 1980s and 1990s – has gone the way of the dodo, replaced by the Blackberry or similar all-encompassing personal device.
Mike Hall, director at PMG Estates, knows about the importance of so-called converging technology, and equally how it makes work inescapable. For Hall, technology outsourcing has been critical in getting his development company operating efficiently.
“For a company of our size, outsourcing is very important,” he says. “And it’s unproblematic – we make the call and our long-term technology partner eLINIA sorts it out. Technology wise, we’ve all got BlackBerries, which yes, you sometimes wish weren’t there.”
Even the business meeting, the basic building block of corporate life, is being challenged by the rise of video conferencing.
Meeting contacts and networking is also getting easier with websites such as Linkedin offering a neat way of establishing communication. Some bosses even swear by tools such as Facebook, traditionally the preserve of shirking students, to bolster their contact book.
And while personal meetings will never be eliminated, there are strong economic and environmental cases to be made for video conferencing to form at least a portion of a company’s networking activity.
“We’ve found that in the past five years video conferencing has skyrocketed,” says Wave Audiovisuals UK operations manager Andrew Martin. “For instance, a large company we deal with found that it spent about £2.5m a year on travel and accommodation for meetings.
“After investing heavily in video conferencing it was able to dramatically reduce that figure. And with environmental concerns growing, it can reduce carbon emissions, too.”
He adds: “When looking at the hi-tech office, you have to get infrastructure right at the start. If you get it right, everything else falls into place.
“The bandwidth of the internet connection coming in is hugely important. In the past bosses would have to concern themselves with whether they had enough phone lines. Now, ensuring that the flow of data can be managed is a big issue.”
Technology has made working more remotely easier than ever – which should be good news for some workers in Wales who travel in substantial distances by car from locations in the valleys to urban centres such as Cardiff, Newport and Swansea.
Remote working can help get people back to work from maternity leave or long-term sick leave. But remote working, as its name suggests, also has the potential to leave workers isolated. Recent research by BT indicated that 88 per cent of managers had never received training on how to manage remote workers and were not familiar with their IT requirements.
Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, says: “Work is no longer a place you go to, but something you do. Information and communications technology has provided the means for millions of people to work remotely, yet many businesses are hampered by outdated management techniques.”
“We’ve seen huge benefits from remote working for many years internally at BT, which is why we have created this toolkit aimed at equipping managers to help their workers truly take their office anywhere.”
Employing remote workers means opening up the network, though, and that can open up a whole new can of digital worms for companies.
Without proper security measures, unscrupulous hackers can get access to sensitive files and company data. After all, not so long ago the Pentagon’s mainframe was hacked into by a teenager, so what chance does a small Welsh business stand?
Thankfully, if the right measures are taken, the chances of online intruders can be minimised – as can the chances of workers opting to kick back with Jeremy Kyle or attending to their Facebook account instead of getting down to some work.
“When anybody makes off-site connections – be it their house or at a public wi-fi spot – there has to be appropriate technology to access the network securely,” says Edwards. “Things need to be encrypted.”
Something as seemingly innocuous as a memory stick also has the potential to cause damage to main systems. And for that reason it’s becoming more common for businesses in Wales to issue workers with sticks specifically for work use, so personal items that may compromise security are off the agenda.
There will always be employees who use the internet to look for information which may be time-wasting at best, or actually harmful. But monitoring what employees are looking at online is an easy option.
“Big brother is definitely out there,” says Edwards. “There are lots of web-filtering products that you can put into a network – you can actually monitor what sites people are looking at and block sites, but allow sites such as Facebook to be accessed by employees during their lunch breaks.”
So are offices of the future in Wales destined to be an Orwellian nightmare where the constant chirrup of your BlackBerry is as inescapable as the beady eyes preventing you from a quick scan of the Welsh team sheet for the weekend internationals? And will video conferencing replace meeting clients for coffee?
Not neccessarily. Business is a human concern, after all. But technology is changing the way we work, and those who get the most out of it will be those who understand it best.
