Remote working here to stay

Seventy per cent of businesses are doing it, reports Natasha Lomas on Silicon.com

Published: 13 March 2008 12:59 GMT

The megalithic corporate HQ which deforms the city skyline could be a thing of the past if a technology trend toward remote working continues.

In a research report into the 21st century workforce, analyst house Quocirca predicts: “In the future it may make sense for businesses to have more numerous small locations near to centres of population to reduce commuting and be closer to customers. Businesses that do this will rely increasingly on electronic collaboration technology to keep employees in communication with each other.”

While most businesses are still based on a traditional HQ plus branch offices structure, remote working is now commonplace; according to the research, around 70 per cent of enterprises polled said at least a quarter of their staff work remotely at some point during the working week.

Pressure to shrink carbon footprints and attract and retain talented staff could see workforces becoming more distributed, said Quocirca.

The report said: “In the future, carbon taxes may drive businesses to open smaller locations, relying on technology for collaboration between workers and reducing the distance that both employees and customers have to travel.”

The research shows once a business develops a culture of remote working the level of service experienced by remote workers becomes increasingly important to it – or, as Quocirca analyst and report author Bob Tarzey explains, distributed working becomes “a fundamental part of what they do”.

Laptops are currently the most embedded devices in distributed business practices, said Tarzey – having been around for longest – but he said he expects to see that change as more and more business processes are enabled on mobile devices such as smart phones.

The Quocirca research was commissioned by Riverbed Technology.

A separate survey of UK and North American IT chiefs, conducted by network security company AEP Networks, has found 94 per cent either already allow or plan to allow network access to remote workers.

From here to cyberspace

Social networking sites are growing up and becoming much more than glorified address books, says Bill Thompson.

About a year ago I asked my daughter, who was 15 at the time, if she would “ADD” me as a friend on MySpace so I could comment on her profile and be part of her online social network.She refused point blank.Not because she wanted to keep things secret, but because it would be unutterably naff to have your dad as a MySpace friend. Recognising that she was right, I didn’t push it. She knows how to look after herself online – she’s a member of the Childnet International children’s’ panel and helps write the guidance for other young people. But yesterday she added me as a friend on Facebook, where she now has a profile too. Not only that, she has admitted in public that she is my daughter.

A brave step indeed.

In fact, I’m less concerned with her privacy now than I am with my own. She’s 16 and can look after herself, but now she has access to my online friendship network. Not only will she be able to see who I’m hanging out with, she’ll also be able to send them all messages.

Site seeing

This is one of the big problems with Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and the other social network sites. They bring the many different groups we all belong to into one online space, creating a “social soup” that encourages intermingling when most of us work hard to keep our friends, family and colleagues just a little bit separate, negotiating the boundaries with more or less skill. The tools used to manage privacy and sharing online remain crude and inflexible compared with the nuanced way we handle real-life social networks, and we are going to have to learn to deal with the new modes of social engagement that result.

Although Lili is now on Facebook, she is adamant that she’ll stay on MySpace too, a view that has forced me to revise the model of social network progression I’ve put forward in the past. I used to think that young people would start off in the controlled environment of Penguin World or Habbo Hotel, move to the adolescent chaos that is MySpace and then mature into confident Facebook users. But I suspect it will be a lot less clear cut. For one thing, you can’t pimp your Facebook profile with garish colours, unreadable fonts and appalling backgrounds. And while Facebook offers a “wall” to write comments on, it lacks the directness of a MySpace profile.

Whether or not she abandons MySpace, I do think that Facebook will become more important to her simply because it is rapidly becoming more than just a social network site. Its support for third-party applications and services is turning it into a platform for all other forms of online social activity, from talking about movies via the Flixster application to asking friends questions or “superpoking” them. Facebook may well become the single point of contact with one’s online networks, wherever they may be hosted. I rarely visit Twitter, the site that lets you send short updates about what you’re up to, because it’s easier to post from within Facebook. And as this trend develops, more and more of us will spend more and more time on Facebook instead of elsewhere.Once someone builds “MySpaceBook”, an application that lets you run your MySpace profile from within Facebook, the game will be over. Of course, we need to temper our enthusiasm for this connected world. Google was recently criticised by Privacy Internatonal over its cavalier “trust us, we’re not evil” attitude to personal privacy and user information, and we need to make sure that we are not asking the same questions about Facebook in two years’ time. Yet privacy concerns do not bother most of Google’s hundreds of millions of users, and they are unlikely to stop Facebook’s rapid adoption, so it is worth speculating about where social network sites will go next.

Future first

One thing that may change significantly is the way we interact with the services. At the moment, Facebook and MySpace are page-oriented and text-heavy, but alternatives seem to be emerging. Like many other technology watchers, I’ve been captivated recently by a preview release of a new program called Photosynth, developed at Microsoft Live labs.

This astonishing piece of technology gives the lie to the tale that Microsoft is unable to innovate effectively and could change the way we think about live online. Photosynth takes a large number of photos of a place or an object, analyses them for similarities, and then stitches them together into a three-dimensional space that allows you to move from photo to photo by clicking, scrolling and panning around in a way which is completely captivating. It is the future of user interaction, the way we will manage to take the flat 2D web that we currently experience and turn it into a virtual world. Photosynth works with pictures, but pictures are just data and there is no reason I can see why it could not also work with user profiles, web pages, maps or any other form of semi-structured data.I could navigate my social network as easily as I navigate the collection of photos of the Piazza San Marco in Venice that is provided as one of the demonstrations, or move from web page to web page following a breaking news story.With Facebook as the open social network platform, Google offering search, e-mail and applications, and Photosynth stitching it all together into one graphical 3D space that we navigate with a mouse or a Nintendo Wii-like controller, we are moving closer to the model of cyberspace described by William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

Gibson imagined an online world in which large corporations defined rigid hierarchical structures of data like the “stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority”. By contrast, we could have billions of Flickr photos and Facebook profiles stitched together into an ever-changing quilt, but the end result would be the “graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system” that he described.

We may be watching on screens instead of having a direct neural input allowing us to “jack in” to the matrix, but it will still be a lot more fun than today’s flat web.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/6764751.stmPublished: 2007/06/19 07:55:13 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Surf’s up – Ocean City’s public wireless network

The internet is so much part of everyday life for so many people in the developed world, that access to it has arguably become an essential of modern living. The story below is an example of a growing trend around the world for municipalities to provide it as a public service. Certainly a useful development, but perhaps also a significant indicator of the increasing desire of people to use the power of the internet to free them from reliance on specific physical locations in which to work or enjoy online social interaction.  AJ

July 30, 2007 Ocean City, New Jersey, is about to become one of the first American dot com-munities. As part of a $3 million plan to upgrade public services in the popular tourist destination, small wi-fi transmitters are being installed on light posts to drench the city in a wireless internet network. Access to the high speed broadband will be free for the residents and will be available to tourists for a small charge. And with a tourist base that increases the town’s population from 15,000 to 130,000 in the summer, it’s a safe bet the council will more than get their money back. .

30 July 2007, 14:39:09 – Gizmag Emerging Technologies Magazine

Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my…. office!

EIDO PR has recently introduced some powerful new tools for clients to interact directly with their PR programmes. Adrian Jones, principal of EIDO PR, explains the methodology and the advantages that these facilities bring.  

Businesses have traditionally been dependent on a bricks-and-mortar presence for their livelihoods. Yet, in the Western economies, knowledge-based business is fast becoming the prevalent form of commerce. Knowledge business, as the name implies, relies much more on the software that we all carry around with us in our heads than physical assets such as machinery or office hardware. The demands of business have changed, and with it, our response to those demands.

There is now a far greater reliance on work outside of the traditional workplace. It’s tempting to think of this as a new phenomenon, but it’s actually no more than the logical progression of a trend that started with the arrival of the mobile phone. In business terms, the significance of the mobile phone was that it freed people from reliance on the office phone system, and for the first time, allowed them the freedom to work effectively away from their desks.

The internet allows us to do that far more effectively, and arguably, has had an even more dramatic effect on business practices than the mobile. It has, however, proved a good deal more challenging to integrate into the business landscape. Certainly, technology was a factor in that development process, but the internet as a business medium has also required some time to gain acceptance as a concept. This was quite a different process than the route that the mobile took in becoming a de rigeur business tool. The concept of the telephone was already well developed long before the advent of the mobile phone; the internet, on the other hand, had the business community scratching its head for quite a while before they worked out what to do with it.

The majority of people now accept that the internet is a powerful – if not indispensable – tool for business, and its use in the shape of websites and email is now pretty much universal.  However the internet –like business – has not remained static over the last decade. The growing confidence in the underlying technology and the increasing demands of knowledge business in the 21^st Century means we are now on the threshold of another conceptual shift in how the internet is used.

As personal computing and personal networking have become increasingly sophisticated, the ability for people to work remotely has increased dramatically. The average household now has the computing power that businesses of a decade ago could only dream of. Many businesses now accept remote working as a fact of life, but in reality, remote working is already becoming inadequate to cope with the demands of today’s knowledge business.

The word “remote” implies nothing more than something occurring away from its usual location. However the reality is that business is now moving away from dependence on the physical office environment altogether. Consequently, the phrase “remote working” has very little meaning in knowledge business because “knowledge” IS the business. Therefore the “business” can only exist where the knowledge is. The challenge for us – and for any knowledge business – is to get that raw material in front of the people that need it. We call it “distributed working”.

For us, distributed working is the only business model that allows effective day-to-day management of complex interactions between individuals who certainly don’t share the same physical space and – more often than not – are not even in the same time zone! Distributed working recognises that the business world in a knowledge-based economy is hugely more dynamic and fluid than that for which our “traditional” business structures and practices were invented to serve. We also recognise that most knowledge workers have to deal with a vast array of inputs simultaneously, coming at them from all angles and it is no longer possible to process these effectively in a linear “inbox-to-outbox” fashion.  Distributed working allows many people to collaborate effectively in a non-linear environment, completely irrespective of their physical location or time zone, and yet to participate much more fully in the interactions which are the life-blood of knowledge businesses.

At EIDO, we have embraced distributed working as a core philosophy of our business. From July 07, we are rolling out a programme of powerful new online facilities which will enable all clients to take advantage of distributed working in their interactions with us and with colleagues, wherever they happen to be. We are tremendously excited by the possibilities that these developments will bring, and look forward to exploring them more fully with clients over the coming months.

Adrian Jones

Principal

EIDO Public Relations

  

For more details about this – or any aspect of our services, please contact us at enquiries@eido-pr.eu or call +44 (0)1227 762244

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