How to use Collaboration technology to grow your skills pool and shrink your carbon footprint

best practice guide How to use Collaboration technology to grow your skills pool and shrink your carbon footprint

best practice guide Ask any savvy manager about some of the greatest business challenges today, and finding and retaining talent will often top the list. Building a solid workforce can be difficult for a variety of reasons. The talent pool is scattered across the globe. Employees or potential employees now bring their own list of job requirements to a company, such as wanting the company to be sustainable as a means for assuring the longevity of their future position, as well as to be socially and environmentally conscious to keep them proud of where they work. One survey showed that a significant number of workers from Generation Y would go so far as to take a cut in salary to enable them to work for an organisation that changes the world in a positive way. With the increase in the variety of skills a company needs today, finding technical talent with certification and experience in an industry of ever-developing technology is even harder. What are organisations to do? Take, for example, the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE). There are less than 15,000 CCIEs in the world, says Shaun Struckmann, Senior Global Practice Manager at Dimension Data. When your organisation is looking to employ an individual as specific as a voice-specialised CCIE who has the skills to connect a new system to legacy architecture, your biggest challenge will be finding the talent to facilitate it, rather than the demands of the task itself. Finders keepers The challenges don t end when you ve found the resources: you ll need to convince him or her to join your organisation and develop and grow with it. What s more, if the potential employee has the skills you re looking for, you can assume that he or she s being inundated with recruiter calls or exposed to a variety of web-based job options. To win new talent, organisations must engage innovative ways of attracting and keeping employees. Collaboration tools may offer an answer. While they reduce travel and other costs, they can also serve as a long-term solution to staffing your organisation. Having the tools in place to allow employees to telework is as much to your company s benefit as it is to a job candidate s decision to join and stay with your company, for both emotional and practical reasons. From telecommuting to teleworking Telecommuting is not new. Companies have been giving people the option to work from home for some years, in a move to promote a better work-life balance and save on the environmental and financial cost of commuting. But the days of expensive ISDN lines to access the corporate database and complicated call redirection to forward work calls are gone. In the past, employees could work from home only a day or two a week without losing productivity. Today, entire teams can be home-based or dispersed among various geographic locations with no reduction in efficiency. The positive effect on employee morale and the reduction of the company s carbon footprint can be dramatic. The word telecommute referred to working via the telephone, using a modem. Today s remote worker is more than a telecommuter: he or she is a teleworker, and can have face-to-face video interaction with colleagues and clients, access to all the corporate information available in the office, real-time conversations with co-workers on secure instant messaging programmes, and collaboration through Web-based presentation-sharing platforms. A teleworker can work in an office or at home, and there is almost no difference in the way the work is done. Collaboration tools can help you select talent because of their skill sets and not simply their location all while encouraging a healthier worklife balance for your employees. The benefits of creating a teleworkforce A teleworkforce is not merely a group of employees who work from home. Collaboration tools can also help make your existing road warriors such as sales teams and engineers more efficient. These tools allow access to all the information available in the office while they re visiting a client, travelling by train, or by road. They can focus on selling and engineering and not on how to get connected. When collaboration tools are implemented fully, your workforce can expand and truly become a teleworkforce. If you want to shrink your carbon footprint, you typically start by reducing travel. Using air travel to attend a meeting is not only expensive, but also detrimental to the environment. Gathering the team together for a group discussion should not mean expensive travel or, at its worst, a one-way audio bridge. According to the US-based Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), using electronics to work from home or away from an office can save 9 to 14 billion kwh of energy each year, which equates to carbon savings of about 4.5 to 7 million tonnes per year. This is also equivalent to the amount of power used by a million US households annually. Allowing people to work from home also lowers the number of cars on the road, thereby reducing exhaust gasses and easing the traffic load. Allowing employees the flexibility to work from home, or to be more productive while travelling, can reduce energy consumption and minimise real estate requirements. Large campus environments can shrink into more manageable and flexible workspaces. The production floor and technical labs will never go away, but you now have the ability to consolidate workspaces by making space more generalised. A hot desk in an office can serve as a station for a remote workforce with a single phone that allows assigned extensions to be entered replacing the number of phones you need and the amount of energy they consume. Fewer phones also means less electronic waste. Sustainability is not only about reducing our impact on the environment, but also delivering tangible economic and social benefits. This is possible by putting tools and systems in place to achieve a long-lasting reduction in travel, energy, and waste. Meetings made simple Businesses require seamless interaction between employees in order to run their operations as smoothly as possible. To truly create a mobile workforce, you need to have tools in place to replace meetings. Different meetings have different requirements, but the maturity of collaboration tools now available makes moving to a mobile workforce easier. Ad hoc one-on-one meetings, scheduled group meetings, or large one-to-many presentations are easier with these tools, so it s important to understand how you meet, says Struckmann.

best practice guide With the increase in the variety of skills a company needs today, finding technical talent with certification and experience in an industry of ever-developing technology is even harder. What are organisations to do?

best practice guide Then and now Historically, ad hoc one-on-one meetings entailed picking up the phone or walking into someone s office. Today, presence functionality allows you to see if a person is available, to send an instant message (IM) and ask a quick question, or to escalate to a phone or video conversation, regardless of location. Working becomes more efficient, and time waiting on responses is cut, and it s all done with a few mouse clicks in the corporate directory. Scheduled group meetings used to involve booking a conference room and gathering in one location. Employees out of the area either missed the meeting, or were forced to travel to it. Today, we can schedule meetings online, send agendas, and share documents prior to the meeting. We can still gather in a conference room, but now others can join in virtually and participate wherever they are via video from their computer, which integrates seamlessly with the video facility in the conference room. When you need a more formal meeting and want the advantage of life-size participants, high-definition audio and video, and lifelike face-to-face conversations can take place through an immersive telepresence system. One-to-many presentations used to be prepared well in advance. Organisations often hired third parties to prepare, manage, and monitor these presentations. These services were expensive, and, as a result, companies used them sparingly. This has all changed with desktop telepresence units and web-based presentation applications that make this process much simpler and far less expensive. With just a user licence and a web camera, an employee can set up, launch and present to a very large audience, with little effort. The same tools can be used to record pre-planned presentations that can be uploaded to the corporate intranet and viewed by employees in their spare time using the device of their choice. The meetings described above don t require travel that is, taking time out of the workday or employees personal time and causing the business to create more damage to the environment. What s more, a global workforce often means that meetings aren t during normal business hours for some of the participants due to time zone differences. To truly have a global organisation, the convenience of being able to get in touch with others in a variety of ways from a multitude of locations is vital. With the appropriate technologies, each meeting type can be more effective and less expensive. The tools of the trade The right systems and tools available today aren t difficult to deploy. However, ensuring these tools work together to empower a remote workforce and reduce cost and carbon footprint is imperative. Creating an integrated solution requires the expertise of an experienced integrator. But what are the current tricks of the trade? Remote phone proxy Remote phone proxy allows a phone to connect to the corporate IP-enabled private branch exchange (PBX) over the Internet. A user takes the phone home, plugs it into a router, and it authenticates to the proxy, giving it access to the internal network where the PBX is located. The phone then functions as if it were in a local office. Calls can be made and received over the corporate WAN and long distance charges are kept in the company. This also provides user-class-ofservice configurations assigning dial rights to users or groups of users. Taking the remote phone a step further by using extension mobility lets users seamlessly move from the home office, to a local office or remote offices. With extension mobility, users can log into any corporate phone and keep their designated phone numbers. The service creates the foundation for hot-desking: multiple employees alternate using a single physical work station. Instant messaging and presence Instant messaging has evolved significantly since its inception. Security, presence, integration with corporate directories, voice, video, and desktop sharing are examples of features available on today s instant messaging platforms. In instant messaging, presence is the ability of the device to display levels of a colleague s availability. Presence allows remote employees the same ability as those in the office to ask quick questions when someone is available without having to wait for email or phone responses. This requires an instant messaging server, presence server, and integration with the corporate directory. Virtual desktop Virtual desktop is not a new concept; it has gone beyond the traditional thin client or green screens. Virtual desktops put the user s interface in a virtualised environment, where the virtualised desktop is stored on a remote server instead of a local one. Virtual desktops deliver numerous benefits, including: Lower cost the computing power requirements of end points is reduced, thus cheaper end points can be used. Stronger security arguably the most important benefit is having the information stored only in a secure central location and not residing on multiple remote end-user devices. Simplified management and support virtual desktops are easier to support. Remote device access having lower CPU requirements means smaller and more portable devices, and allows users to securely access their complete desktops from a tablet device. Requirements for a virtual desktop environment include a central virtual server usually a virtualised blade server platform connected to a storage area network. Virtualisation and management software is also required. Web conferencing Web conferencing allows users to conduct meetings as if they were in the same room, share documents, take questions, write on a whiteboard, and enable productive meetings. Web conferencing is available through cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription models, or it can be brought in-house using a more traditional server in the data centre model. Web conferencing systems can integrate audio conferencing, and using a single platform, simplifies the experience itself as well as the management and support of the solution.

best practice guide Desktop video systems Options for desktop video end points include software clients, video-enabled phones and desktop-sized video conferencing systems. Beyond the obvious available bandwidth, the quality of the experience relies on several factors. For software clients, the camera attached to the desktop, as well as the central processing unit s power of the desktop or for laptops, the integrated web camera, makes a difference. A good experience requires a high-definition (HD) camera and a modern PC or laptop. Desktop phones, corporate directories, and ease of use are important. Installing a videophone without having it connect to other non-video phones in the company, is counter-productive. Similarly, users won t use the videophone if they must type a long email address using a phone keypad each time they call someone. Desktop-sized video end points are a more expensive solution, but provide the best experience. Mini HD telepresence systems that fit on your desk and replace your desktop monitor are convenient as they take up minimum extra space and display HD-quality video simply with the push of a button. Room video solutions Traditionally, the boardroom or office conference room has been the place for hanging projectors and screens and wiring devices up to complicated audio-visual (AV) control systems. Today, portable room-based systems are available. The quality and ease-of-use of modern room visual communication (VC) units are far superior to AV-integrated Frankensystems. Dimension Data s research shows that one typical room-based VC unit saves an average of 11,818 miles and 2.13 tonnes of carbon per year. Managed VC units typically save double this, due to a higher adoption rate. 2 Plus, having the ability to roll the unit in and out of rooms provides flexibility in how and where the unit can be used. Standard maintenance and repairs are also less complicated. Immersive telepresence Replacing a face-to-face meeting with the most realistic experience available, an immersive telepresence room is the answer. Dimension Data s research shows that one typical immersive telepresence unit saves an average of 600,000 miles in air travel and 108.33 tonnes of carbon per year. 3 The large HD screens appear to be a window into the other side of the office. These systems require more planning because of room and bandwidth requirements, but make the user feel as if he or she is at the same table with the other attendees. Thanks to the quality of these units, return on investment is achieved over a short period. There are now several options ranging in size from personal office to large conference rooms seating 18 people. Video recording and content management The subject of video content is often left out of the initial visual communications conversation. Recording video and video content can be more useful for your organisation than pure traditional videoconferencing. Recording video can be achieved using your end points, but to make the videos available to the masses, you need to transcribe it into multiple formats viewable on multiple devices. This is accomplished using a hardware platform system with digital signal processors and an easy-to-use web interface. Once the videos are created, you ll also need a storage and delivery platform. For an experience similar to You Tube, you ll need enterprise-grade security for storage and retrieval. Network infrastructure An upgrade to more modern network gear can vastly improve roll-out speed, accuracy and, ultimately, performance. Many modern routers and switches are sufficiently intelligent to auto-configure themselves, provide configurations to new end points, and automatically adjust quality of service settings. This is certainly something you want to verify before you purchase new networking equipment. Getting started A collaboration project requires careful planning. Your first step is to uncover the business requirements and underlying process improvements where collaboration tools can be useful. A consulting engagement that includes understanding your strategic objectives and outlines a collaboration roadmap is vital. Then, identifying your current engagement models, including meeting types, communication mediums, and user groups can help define a complete solution that fits with the underlying infrastructure. A collaboration project is a good time to undertake a thorough network assessment. Engage an experienced systems integrator that will help you with the current and end-state analysis of your network, and then provide plan and design assistance, as well as installation and configuration. The partner can also make sure that the system will be sustainable both in reducing long-term costs and environmental impact. You will also need to consider an adoption management programme. A partner can assist with pre-install awareness campaigns, initial and ongoing training, and usage and adoption management. This will ensure you are getting the return on your investment you were expecting. 2 Environmental Sustainability Targets Methodology. Dimension Data. November 2014. 3 Environmental Sustainability Targets Methodology. Dimension Data. November 2014.

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