Is the traditional boardroom meeting dead? The rise of the Smart Room.

Is the shift to flexible working and the widespread utilisation of mobile technology killing the traditional boardroom meeting?

The business meeting has been the mainstay of business communication for decades. The meeting has long been a key facilitation tool for organisations. It’s a chance to discuss issues, resolve challenges together and communicate decisions.

Managing this key outcome has been a challenge with work practices changing:

• Teams are often distributed around a city, county or globally. It is increasingly rare for all the key stakeholders to be in the same place at the same time.
•  The drive towards more productive work, utilising new mobile technology such as smartphones and tablets. There has been a massive uptake of these devices with many professionals relying on them to undertake essential work tasks such as email.
• Flexible work hours. Staff are increasingly working flexible hours often logging on from home, outside of the typical nine-to-five routine, to join meetings.
• Standard boardroom technology, even the humble blue VGA cord, is no longer cutting it, as the multitude of mobile devices in use today won’t plug into or be able to access the technology, causing increasing levels of hassle and delay as presenters struggle to set up their devices for the meeting.

Certainly many larger organisations have started to adapt to these changing circumstances, installing complex and usually very expensive audio-visual systems, often with integrated video conferencing, in the main boardroom. However this is an unaffordable luxury for most companies. But more importantly, it still forces the majority of participants to gather in the one central location.

The Rise Of The Smart Room

Toolsets are starting to emerge to solve these challenges. The “Smart Room” is developing as a leading contender, providing greater flexibility and affordability. Rather than investing solely in the main corporate boardroom, organisations are starting to respond by installing smart rooms throughout the business.

The 6 elements of a Smart Room

1. A good sized wall mounted panel.
2. The ability to wirelessly present to the room, also known as “airplaying.”
3. High definition video conferencing capability. This element is likely to represent 25%-50% of the total cost of the solution.
4. Virtual workspace enabled devices so participants can bring their familiar desktop experience into the meeting.
5. Multi-site user access. The ability for users to access the meeting simply from multiple locations using multiple devices.
6. Electronic whiteboards that all participants can see and access, allowing for greater interactivity and participation from remote users.

The price point for a Smart Room continues to fall quickly and currently sits under the ten thousand dollar mark. At the same time, the bandwidth requirements for a good user experience are also coming down.

With these six elements in place an organisation can run an effective decentralised meeting, providing a consistent, high quality experience to all users, regardless of their location. Attendees are able to join the meeting using their preferred device, log on quickly and securely access the information they need for the meeting.

Looking at a more flexible workspace – download our Flexible Working whitepaper.

What’s next for BYOD? From BYOD to xYOD

The trend towards BYOD (bring your own device) was the phrase on everyone’s lips in 2012. Driven by the huge uptake of mobile devices; both smartphones and tablets, ubiquitous wireless access to the Internet and the consumersation of technology, it seemed nothing could stop the BYOD juggernaut.

But CIOs have been considering carefully how to secure the true operational benefits of mobility. Three models have started to emerge.

First is the short-term fix. In this environment the IT department is responding to the huge uptake of mobile devices and are acknowledging that they need to include these devices in their IT framework. IT must be able to push policies, secure data, encryption and have remote wipe capabilities on the staff’s mobile devices. There are high expectations from all employees to be able to use their mobile devices to become more productive.

At the other end of the spectrum is the long-term solution where IT is providing a fully agile computing environment. In this scenario the organisation is able to accommodate different platforms, different operating systems and different applications as well as manage the safety of the corporation’s data.

This is a fully considered infrastructure approach;  an issue of architecture. It is device agnostic and provides tremendous flexibility. It holds the promise of full access, anytime on any device. Logicalis’ virtual workspace is an example of this approach.

More recently, a middle ground is emerging which is an extension of the short term, basic approach. This approach delivers an enhanced mobile experience. It provides all the elements of the short-term solution and delivers the mobile experience to the user, such as simplified device registration, push policies, secure data and providing the sets of applications staff member’s need for their work. However, it also allows users to browse internal corporate networks easily and efficiently and access files seamlessly and remotely. This means mobile users don’t have to email themselves files or pull files from the network into a personal Dropbox folder or similar, to get access to the information they need while working on their mobile devices. The IT department can set more advanced protocols, for example sensitive emails with attachments can be viewed but not forwarded.

In this environment IT departments exert more control over the user’s experience while still enabling the productivity inherent in the use of mobile devices. By providing a more structured experience IT is able to unleash the potential of these mobile devices, many of which have more compute power than the typical thin client.

Increasingly, the CIO is looking at making tablets the standard computing device. However, for this to work the tablet must be converted into a pseudo desktop by docking with a good-sized monitor and keyboard (at a minimum); when the user is in traditional desktop work mode.

Some standardisation of mobile devices has to occur for this to work at a practical level. Without this, the myriad of required connectors and docking stations would be mind-boggling and a potential support nightmare. Equally, IT can play an important role in enhancing the users’ mobile experience by recommending a suite of applications, perhaps from an “Enterprise App Store” or similar.

By adopting an xYOD model; a hybrid approach; the CIO and the IT department are acting more as “mobile brokers” developing a strong mobile experience for users whilst exerting sufficient control over the computing environment to maximise the operational benefits to the organisation.

Find out more about Logicalis’ approach and resources to implementing secure mobility or BYOD on our Logicalis Virtual Workspace page.

How is Cloud impacting the CIO – Shadow IT (Part 1)

Gartner recently forecast that the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017. This startling prediction is driven by a symptom that is already starting to emerge in 2013. The rise of “Shadow IT” (or “Stealth IT”).

It’s a simple phrase that disguises a potentially significant threat to the existing order of things for CIOs and it looks like its starting to shape the future role of the CIO and their team. Logicalis is running a short survey on the influence of the cloud on the the IT Department – and we’d like your thoughts.

Shadow IT describes more than just the shift to the consumerisation of IT and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) – it includes how enterprise-grade hardware, software and services are being bought and managed outside of the mainstream IT organisation and direct control of the CIO. As an example, CIOs are already trying to deal with heads of sales and marketing purchasing large scale CRM and, Marketing Automation Systems without the IT function having direct oversight of the selection, procurement, deployment and management of the solution.

Shadow IT creates some significant exposure for an organisation. In particular, the threat of losing control over corporate data. Faced with security controls designed to stop data leaving the corporate network, users are setting up their own accounts in the cloud on platforms such as Dropbox to enable them to work on different devices. (A survey late last year found that one in five business users uploaded work documents to Dropbox, with the most blatant offenders being staff in more senior positions.) We are already seeing the trend towards the consumerisation of IT extend to cloud based software applications in addition to devices. Whether CIOs like it or not, their organisation’s data is exposed.

Gartner Fellow David Cearley sees the logical extension of this phenomenon as the emergence of the “personal” or private cloud,” where individuals keep their personal content, access their preferred services via a variety of devices, ultimately replacing the PC. No single organisation is going to be able to exert complete control in this brave new world, so better for CIOs to embrace and influence it.

This suggests that mitigating this risk by establishing “data sovereignty,” taking ownership and control over your data, and associated service level agreements should be an early priority for CIOs. Formal disaster recovery and business continuity planning is hardly a new mandate for the CIO, but updating these policies and procedures to account for Shadow IT seems a vital step.

As always, a key challenge for organisations in adapting to an emerging strategic direction is performing the balancing act between managing risk and creating innovation for competitive advantage. Gartner predicts that in 2014, 30% of Global 1000 companies will broker (aggregate, integrate and customize) two or more cloud services for internal and external users. This is up from 5% today. This is a very rapid shift. CIOs must at the very least formulate a strategic response to cloud computing.

Increasingly, it seems the role of the CIO and their team is to act as a “broker” of cloud services for the organisation, because:

• CIOs are finding it hard to manage all the challenges of their internal customers when it comes to provisioning, managing and integrating hybrid cloud solutions.
• While external providers play a key role in implementation and management of cloud services, the organisation sees the CIO and their team as being best placed to set the overall direction and manage the relationships between stakeholders.
• Acquiring and keeping a team with all the necessary skills to integrate and customise multiple cloud services at scale is very challenging and requires a huge investment. Increasingly CIOs are looking to external service providers for these skills.
• This approach enables the CIO to re-exert control and rebuild influence within the organisation, as Gartner puts it in its Predicts 2013 publication, “The internal CSB (cloud services broker) role represents a means for the IT organisation to retain and build influence…and to become a value centre in the face of challenging new requirements…”

What’s your view of the influence of the cloud on your role. Why not take 5 minutes and tell us your views in our short survey – the findings will be included in Part 2 of our “Cloud and the CIO” blog series.

Australia’s Biggest BYOD Challenge

Australian companies could face a problem, if you believe that acceptance of BYOD adds to a company’s productivity. That’s certainly the view of in many high growth emerging economies, who are embracing BYOD in a far bigger way than here, or in most mature markets.

It’s the surprising finding from an Ovum report, commissioned by Logicalis, that looked at how employee attitudes to work/life balance drove BYOD behaviour. Over 3,750 people were surveyed in 17 different countries – enough to show significant variations in attitudes to work and the devices we use.

Mature markets and the work-life divide

Many Australians like to keep their home life and work life separate. Only half the Australians surveyed surveyed agreed with the statement: “Being able to access corporate emails and other business apps outside official working hours enables me to do my job better.” It’s a similar response in most other developed economies.

In India it’s a very different story; more than 90% agreed with the statement. And the figure isn’t much lower in all the other emerging markets surveyed. It seems the eagerness to get ahead makes these people more willing to blur the lines between work and personal life.

The BYOD divide

The survey showed that BYOD adoption in Australia is relatively low – about 40%. As you can see in the chart, that’s just a little below the average for mature markets. But the average in growth markets is markedly high, exceeding 80% in several cases. It seems in this eagerness to get ahead, many people are insisting on BYOD to increase their working time.

The company – employee disconnect

Whilst employees in emerging markets share a common desire to use BYO devices, the companies they work for have mixed attitudes. In Russia, for example, 70% of the IT departments either don’t know about it or ignore that it’s happening. Yet in Brazil, Singapore and South Africa more than half the companies encourage the use of BYOD.

The responses are equally as diverse in developed economies. In Australia, 60 % of companies say they encourage the use of BYOD. It’s higher still in the United States.

So, to an extent, we have countries like Australia where companies seem more willing to embrace the shift than the people who work there, whilst in many emerging nations demand is high but many employers have their head in the sand.

The Australian opportunity

Whilst, on the surface, it looks like Australia is facing a challenge from emerging markets eager to use BYOD to improve productivity, there’s a different story sitting behind these figures.

As we’ve seen, we have companies ready and willing to embrace BYOD, supported by management policies. If companies want to compromise their attitude towards work-life balance the capability exists. Elsewhere, in emerging economies, people want to use BYOD, often unsupported by their companies.

Herein lies a major risk. A badly implemented BYOD policy can have catastrophic consequences; something that’s recognised as a concern by many respondents. More than 80% of those who used their own devices in India, UAE, Malaysia and Singapore, for example, said that lack of BYOD management was an issue. In Australia and the US it’s about half that number.

So, ultimately it becomes a question of philosophy. Is BYOD a good idea in terms of how you work? Many Australians think not. But if and when they realise the need to change, their employers will probably have a solution. Our real challenge is less to do with technology and more to do with how we adapt our work mentality to competitive pressures from overseas.

Access the full Ovum report and key Australian findings on our Web site.

The Flexible Working Chasm – Results from the Logicalis flexible working survey

We’ve been collecting responses to our flexible working survey over the last few months: the results are revealing and say a lot about the nature of the modern Australian workplace.

How Common is Flexible Working?

Our Australian based survey of business and IT decision makers discovered that over 60% of organisations have flexible working policies and strategies for some staff roles, whilst over one quarter have those same policies for all staff.

Unsurprisingly, there is a very strong desire for flexible working (over 90%) with slightly over half of all respondents wishing to be location independent (being able to work from anywhere) and another 42% wanting to work from home at least one day per week.

Yet the gap between the survey respondent’s wishes and their daily reality is wide!

Most people would like the chance to work wherever they chose – in fact, over 90% of  respondents would like to work from home or from any location. In reality, about only 1 in 2 of these people (45% of  respondents) are able to do this today; of these almost 30% say they are location independent and can work from anywhere whilst just over 15% work from home at least one day per week.

About 30% remain tethered firmly to a desk and almost 17% are day extenders, working into the night and at weekends once they get home (but only 1.4%  would like to be day extenders). So, the good news is that we are embracing flexible working and we’re enabling staff to work longer hours. But there’s still a lot of employees who would like to see a more flexible workplace.

• To see the responses for the five different worker “profiles” please visit our Flexible Working Survey Results web page.

The Benefits of Flexible Working

At an individual level, the survey respondents are quite clear that flexible working is about driving up personal productivity with 75% agreeing they would be more productive.

From the organisation’s perspective, the main benefits of flexible working were found to be staff productivity, improved staff retention, business continuity and reducing office space.

The Barriers to Flexible Working

Somewhat surprisingly, technology was not seen as the primary barrier, with half of the respondents indicating that current technology was not a major impediment to more flexible working. The biggest barriers came from corporate culture and politics (over 30% seeing it as a major barrier) and the ability of executives to adapt their management style (almost 30% seeing it a s a major barrier.)

Similarly, respondents felt that current HR policies and legal risk were a challenge but less than 20% of respondents thought it was major issue and could be resolved.

Equally, some often quoted barriers to flexible working seem to concern respondents less than one might expect with Security (only 18% seeing it as a major barrier) and Remote support for users (14% seeing it as a major barrier) being seen as surmountable challenges by most.

When looking specifically at technology barriers to flexible working there is a clear focus on enabling personal devices as a corporate tool with almost 55% citing it as of significant value. The implication being  that a BYOD or COPE strategy is an important underpinning to a flexible working platform

Current Technologies Used For Flexible working

For those organsiations that do allow flexible working there is a clear hierarchy of technology being provided: VPN access to corporate resources (72%) Presence/Instant messaging (66%) and Web conferencing (65%) are the key technologies already being provided. Desktop virtualisation and video conferencing whilst provided less frequently at the moment (currently deployed in slightly less than half of cases) are planned to be rolled out by a significant number of respondents and are likely to form the next wave technology deployment to support flexible working.

If you would like to find out more about flexible working please visit our Flexible Working page where you can download our latest whitepaper, which looks at:

• The drivers of flexible working
• The different flexible worker profiles that are emerging
• Building the business case for flexible working
• How to build a roadmap to flexible working that covers technology policy and the physical workplace.

Evaluating the benefits of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Sometimes we don’t need a formal or structured Return On Investment (ROI) study to evaluate if a technology deployment has been a success. Sometimes, plain common sense is all that’s need.

We spoke with Jason Mills, IT Manager at Cooper Grace Ward Lawyers (CGW ) in Brisbane, a large legal practice with more than 230 staff members. Jason was kind enough to spend some of his valuable time to explain the drivers, benefits and lessons learned from CGW’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment.

The key driver for the project was productivity. The current fleet of desktops had well and truly reached their end of lives. The desktops were very slow and significantly compromised the time it was taking to complete tasks, and in a fee-based professional services environment time literally is money. In particular, remote access was very difficult to achieve, with lawyers regularly having to make additional trips into the office out of hours and on weekends to access files that were needed for casework.

Additionally, the PCs were on several different SOEs, using different service packs and applications, making support and maintenance very challenging. The help desk spent the majority of their time “putting out fires.”

Jason wanted the upgrade project to take CGW’s IT infrastructure from “being an inhibitor to being an enabler.” The initial plan to replace the aging desktops was put on hold as Jason researched the firm’s options. He was intrigued by virtual desktop technology, but needed to undertake significant due diligence to ensure it was the right fit for the firm. He read blogs extensively and connected with his peers, however the real work began when he decided to engage with the architects at Logicalis. Working together, they spent around 3 months detailing CGWs specific requirements.

Staff productivity and satisfaction
The VDI approach has worked very well. Staff productivity has risen significantly and in turn this has led to a reduction in frustration levels and an increase in satisfaction.

The real eye opener for the staff was the seamless remote access that they now have. This alone has been tremendously well received by the staff as the team can work with much greater flexibility.

Scalability – Planning for the unexpected
The VDI approach has also scaled very well as the firm’s circumstances have changed. Even though a mobile strategy was not part of the initial brief the infrastructure’s flexibility has been able to flex to accommodate mobile devices across multiple platforms and form factors such as smartphones, tablets, PCs and MACs. The Managing Partner of the business now relies almost exclusively on an iPad when travelling.

The impact on the IT Team
The switch to VDI has had a number of positive impacts on the IT team itself and has given them more time to focus on innovation rather than crisis management. Similarly, given the complexity of the system’s  infrastructure, the IT team’s skills have increased significantly.

Sustainability
CGW has a proactive approach to sustainability and is always looking for sustainable and energy efficient ways to improve its equipment. VDI technology is much more sustainable as it requires less “iron” than a traditional desktop approach. Also, power consumption levels are greatly reduced as each staff member is only using an LCD monitor. This translates into a lower carbon footprint per user.

Cost Comparison: VDI vs Traditional Desktop
Jason estimates that the initial costs were probably a little higher using VDI technology as the firm had to invest in some core infrastructure. Additionally, if they had stayed with the desktop upgrade approach they would have been replaced in waves over time. This would have spread some costs over time but, of course, would have perpetuated the inherent inefficiencies of the older technology. Jason estimates that the VDI vs Desktop cut over point (where VDI started costing CGW less than the desktop upgrade would have) was reached in 20-24 months.

If you would like to read more about this particular deployment you can access a further Case Study that focuses more on the technology used.

COPE – An alternative to BYOD

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work is a topic receiving a huge amount of airplay at the moment and has become a major talking point in corporate IT departments. Primarily this is being driven by the power, design and affordability of personal technology devices, such as smartphones and tablets that are seen by workers as often more useful and certainly more desirable than their corporate counterparts.

Security is a concern when implementing BYOD

However, some organisations worry about BYOD and the security of the organisations data: “Implementing appropriate security model for non-corporate devices” is the second-highest challenge in Logicalis’ recent BYOD survey. Despite well-documented benefits in terms of staff motivation, productivity and reduction of costs, for some types of organisation such as government departments and financial organisations, losing “control” over devices, applications and data security may seem a step too far.
Nonetheless, the demand from users for these mobile devices is virtually unstoppable and rather than try and prevent it, some organisations are turning to a new concept called Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE).

COPE: Delivering the best of both worlds.
Under a BYOD model, staff that are authorised to be part of the program, elect to use their own devices rather than those supplied by the organisation to connect to the corporate network and perform their work tasks. Some BYOD models call for staff to fund device purchases 100%, in other cases the cost of the device is subsidised by the company, but the underlying point is that the individual owns the device, not the organisation.
Under a COPE model the organisation owns the device rather than the individual and enables a communications and collaboration framework and set of policies that facilitates personal as well as professional use of the device, for example a stable of approved applications for Smartphones and Tablets.

In the COPE framework IT departments are able to satisfy the overwhelming demand for personal devices in the workforce but still exert some control over the device choice, mobile device management, access to the corporate network and data. By managing the choice of devices, network access and applications the cost of supporting users is also more controllable as the environment is more predictable.
BYOD offers costs benefits to organisations if it can shift the device purchase costs to the user. Often organisations will reimburse all or part of the device cost so the real savings maybe more modest than at first glance. COPE can also offer some substantial cost benefits in some circumstances, as it allows organisations to exert its often-significant purchasing power to drive down average device purchasing costs.

Keeping data secure in a highly mobile environment is a concern for IT departments. COPE makes dealing with these challenges more straightforward. If the company owns the device, it can wipe, restore and backup data and, since they can preconfigure the device before handing it to employee, IT can easily insert security and application-management policies. Which isn’t to say that mitigating data security risks isn’t possible in a BYOD environment, but its probably fair to say its more complex and a greater departure from current practices.

COPE reduces the change management burden
When implementing BYOD, rewriting company policies and procedures involving the HR and legal departments has been an early and time-consuming part of an effective roll out. With COPE, this burden is likely to be lower. Whilst some amendments are likely, it will be from existing policies and procedures rather than a more fundamental rewrite required to accommodate a BYOD framework.

COPE holds out the prospect of a more conservative profile for those organisations where full BYOD seems a step too far but still allows the employees access to the well-documented advantages of integrating personal and work use on the single device.