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Many companies, especially those with dispersed workforces or client bases, have discovered the economic benefits of video conferencing, also called telepresence. Those that haven’t might want to consider the environmental benefit of this valuable business tool, as well. Although each company’s reduction in carbon footprint from video conferencing might not be much (especially if it is a small or medium-sized business), cumulatively, the effect is profound.
A report commissioned by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and sponsored by AT&T provides solid support for the benefits of this technology. The study, which included an in-depth analysis of 15 corporations, each with four telepresence-enabled conference rooms, developed benefit scenarios for the business community as a whole that are pretty impressive. Specifically:
Add to these benefits the proven economic value of video conferencing, and the argument in favor of this tool becomes even more compelling:
Furthermore, not requiring employees to travel reduces stress, increases productivity and improves work-life balance.
Here’s the best news: telepresence systems have become affordable to implement. Companies that deploy them save money, have happier employees and have a great environmental story to share with their clients. For a demonstration of how telepresence can work for your firm, give me a call at 678.218.1769.
by Dave Moorman
In the 1990s, terms such as telecommuting and teleworking became popular descriptions for the pursuit of work outside the office—with the help of technology. (Telecommuting usually referred to work at home; telework sometimes referred to work at a satellite office.) Today, those terms are being replaced by newer catchphrases like workshifting and the remote [or mobile] workplace.
In reality, all these terms describe essentially the same activity—getting work accomplished anywhere that is not your main place of business. However, the way employees view these activities—and their popularity—varies widely. In a future post, I’ll talk about more about the benefits of other remote workplace solutions. Today, I’d like to share the benefits to SMBs in supporting telecommuting (using the definition of staffers working from home).
According to a study of 67,000 workers, published in June 2012 in the Department of Labor’s Monthly Labor Review, approximately 30% of surveyed workers perform some form of telecommuting (full or part time). That’s approximately the same as in the 1980s.
What’s changed to the benefit of their employees is the amount of extra time they put in at home. In complete opposition to the notion that telecommuters goof off more, the study indicated that those who perform any work at home tend to work five to seven hours more per week than if they weren’t telecommuters. Furthermore, 71% of the telecommuters were managerial or professional employees, who generally aren’t paid overtime.
Here’s some more good news. Despite the extra hours they have to put in, employees want to be able to work from home. In WIRED magazine’s recent reader survey, 62% said the ability to work remotely was important—and their favorite environment, by far (84%) was home. The survey also found that nearly 50% of workers felt more productive and less stressed working remotely.
So, not only are your employees going to work more hours when you let them telecommute at least some of the time, half of them will get more work done than at the office. That’s a powerful incentive to expand your remote working program.
Here’s the kicker: Even if you allow telecommuting, you have to provide the right environment for all these great numbers to fall into place. In the WIRED survey, 45% of respondents said they were encumbered by unmet needs outside the office. The number one complaint (82%) was lack of a high-speed Internet connection to access corporate resources.
DynaSis can’t help you persuade the territorial manager hesitant to give up direct control of his staffers (a leading impediment to the practice, per sources cited in the DoL report). We can help you transition to a cloud-based mobile productivity solution that always gives your workers high-speed, remote access to corporate resources, wherever they are. Give me a call soon and let’s discuss how you can extract the latent productivity in telecommuting.
by Dave Moorman
Corporate mobility has been in the headlines so much over the past few years that you might assume its potential has peaked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every day, application developers debut new products that businesses can implement to fuel the mobile productivity of their workers. For SMBs, the proliferation of BYOD (bring your own device) policies is making it easier—and more affordable—than ever to bring mobile devices into the workplace.
Of course, BYOD comes with risks, but that’s a topic I’ll cover in depth in a different article. Today is all about how you can maximize these devices to propel your business success.
Email: As I mentioned in an earlier blog, numerous surveys report that employees frequently check corporate email during off hours. The amount of benefit your business gains from this is staggering: a study by Good Technology, as reported in August 2012 by CNBC, indicates that after-hours email checking and other “work from home” adds up to a month and a half of overtime, per year.
However, that same article cautions that companies should enable, not expect, their employees to spend time on work issues and email after hours. The key is to strike a balance between employee satisfaction and accomplishment—that’s where the greatest productivity occurs.
Expand Your Boundaries: There are so many helpful business apps available for smartphones (many of them free) that you’re doing yourself a disservice not to explore them. For example, Bump lets two individuals with the app installed exchange business card data, photos, and other information simply by bumping their phones together. And, Bump is cloud-based, not Bluetooth-reliant, with a “smart” protocol that ensures it sends your information only to the phone you actually bumped.
These are just two of the many, many great ideas SMBs can adopt to increase their employees’ mobile productivity. There is a world of opportunities available to you (I’ll share more ideas in future articles.) If you find yourself uncertain which ones to adopt (or how to make them safe), we’ll be happy to help you develop a roadmap that’s both dynamic and safe.
If your office is located in Atlanta, Georgia, there is absolutely no reason you can’t work from Paris, or perhaps a beach in Cabo. After years of going to the same place, at the same time, just to sit at your desk, the habit becomes second nature. We get comfortable with a routine. But there are downsides of these strict habits. For example, even if you get sick, would you think twice about coming into the office to accomplish your daily to-do’s?
We go to great lengths to protect our office environments, even if it can pose a risk to our health and our coworker’s health. These risks aren’t just unhealthy, these routines can become stale and result in loss of time and money. There are better, affordable alternatives to a strict office-only work environment.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work away from the office. Normally, all it takes is a username and password. If you can login to your e-mail. You can remotely login to your desktop and work on any device, like your iPad, and work anywhere there is an Internet connection.
The benefits of being able to access your work environment, untethered to your desktop, are staggering. Suddenly, you will be able to make your kid’s dance rehearsal, take a sick day without risking the office’s health, and travel to the destinations that were too far to justify the time off. With the ability to work remotely, geography becomes much less of a barrier to action.
Traditional office environments are an expensive luxury. Rent, equipment, IT management, and all of the bells and whistles that are required to maintain a healthy work space are extremely costly. Remote work environments are much more affordable in comparison and you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maintaining a smaller office space while having the ability to work remotely offers employees the best of both worlds.
Not only will a remote desktop environment save you money, it will also make employees more productive. Gone are the days of writing ideas down in a notepad. Why bother with that extra step when you can just login and get to work on it? At any time in the day, employees have the ability to be productive. That’s why Microsoft doesn’t think remote working is a nice add-on, they call remote working a, “business imperative.”
Small businesses have been outsourcing their IT for decades, but the recent economic slump has stoked the fire. Thousands of small businesses have found that outsourcing IT services provides them with better, more affordable IT services and support than they could have ever managed internally.
IT services can be customized to fit every businesses unique needs and processes. Some people just need to outsource their maintenance while others might bring in outside experts for a full system upgrade. But there is one IT component that all businesses should be utilizing no matter what: cloud services.
Through cloud services, businesses can access e-mail and office software from anywhere, even at home or on the road. Servers and Applications are centralized in data centers by a Cloud IT provider so that client’s can increase their capabilities without having to invest in new hardware, infrastructure, or the training of new IT personnel.
With the cloud service, consumers do not need to buy expensive hardware or software upfront. Instead, they can pay for specific cloud services like e-mail. Since the e-mail servers are housed in high security data centers, you never have to worry about running low on storage or forgetting to backup your system. Security, backups, and storage are baked right into the services so you never have to worry about them again.
Most people already use cloud services without even realizing it. Mail applications like Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo provide e-mail to millions of users and they never have to worry about upgrading their hardware or software in order to upgrade to the next version. You can access those applications from any smart phone, tablet, or computer. Your e-mail is always available and working so that you can access it anywhere, anytime, and from any device.
With the world moving towards more reliance on technology for their day-to-day activities, experts who know how to handle your IT systems are more important than ever before. Your costs for maintenance will be greatly reduced without the liability of buying software and hardware. Powerful IT service providers like DynaSis give you access to the best available technologies so that you can move your business forward into the future.
Workshifting—the ability for employees to work anytime and anywhere, whether at home, at a coffee shop, or in line at the grocery store—is a concept whose time has come. Not only are employers now able to support workshifting at a variety of levels, but surveys indicate employees want to workshift, even if it's only checking business email first thing in the morning. In fact, a 2011 survey of mobile workers (those with access to mobile business devices outside the office) indicated that 35% of them check business email before doing anything else in the morning—even before getting dressed.
Workshifting at a basic level enables employees to get morning distractions, such as answering overnight emails, out of the way before they reach the office. It lets them put formerly unproductive time, such as time on the train or in line at the coffee shop, to good use.
A large percentage of workers perceive that this approach makes their jobs easier and less stressful, and it certainly boosts corporate productivity. Perhaps even more importantly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in a tight economy, 37% of non-workshifting employees in a recent survey indicated they would take a pay cut if they could work from home.
Some companies are already hiring 100% workshifted employees. These individuals come into the office only when needed for a presentation or other group effort. They are allowed to perform their work wherever they see fit. It's the newest form of telecommuting and it's catching on in businesses of all sizes.
This trend has seen greater adoption by larger enterprises than by the SMB sector, and the reasons are evident. Workshifting almost always involves letting employees use their personal devices—home PCs; smartphones; tablets. SMBs are overwhelmed by the complexities of setting up user policies, access restrictions and other safeguards for mobile devices, yet they do not want to put the business at risk.
Fortunately, managed services like ITility by DynaSis can bridge the gap for SMBs, because the secure Citrix portal used for both staff and management access works on any Internet connected device, but stores no information on it. It's a utility workers use to open a window to corporate data, and when it closes, the gate goes down. Business owners or their designates have full control over access permissions, but DynaSis handles all the configuration issues. It's truly as simple and safe as it sounds.
For more on the benefits of workshifting, we invite you to browse the resources we offer here. Check back often as we will keep adding more.
91% of Americans use a cellphone regularly. Though that is a huge percentage, it might not come as a surprise.
More importantly, how do the other 9% not use cellphones?
If you asked someone 50 years ago whether they would need to take their telephone everywhere they went, some might have said yes, others would have shrugged apathetically. Today, most people get distraught over leaving their cell phones at home for even a short period of time.
Computer technologies are experiencing the same evolution as cellphones. An entire work environment, your files, applications, and desktop no longer needs to be tethered to an office space. Instead, work can travel wherever you go. If your kids get sick, you can take care of them at home and still be productive. While you might enjoy leaving your work in the office, there is much more freedom in having the ability to work from anywhere, anytime.
Mobile solutions come in many flavors. There is application hosting, server hosting, and hot desking. Some people only need access to one application, while others might need access to dozens.
Application hosting is simple. You take the program that is on your computer and you install it onto a server in a cloud datacenter. After the data is migrated, the application can be accessed on any device at anytime. So if your accountant or CPA is traveling, they can still access Quickbooks and run payroll.
Application hosting is for very specific needs, but maybe your needs are a little more complex. Beyond a single application you need e-mail, calendars, and communication services to be accessible anywhere. DynaSis offers MS Exchange hosting within their world class data centers so you can ensure high speeds and 99.999% uptime. For document sharing there is Sharepoint hosting, but if you want to have complete flexibility you need a hot desking solution.
Hot desking opens up the entire desktop environment so that employees can sign onto their “computer” anywhere using a secure, encrypted connection. ITility by DynaSis by DynaSis provides the entire range of mobile solutions and cloud management. Hot desking gives you flexibility, increased security and reduces your need for office space and IT management.
You may not be remotely working yet but the advantages are hard to turn down. Through hot desking, you save money with less personnel managing IT and less office space required because of reduced hardware. Employees can tap into the infrastructure anywhere, anytime, and on any device and become more productive than ever before. In 20 years, you will be left wondering, “Who still needs an office to do work?”
by David J. Moorman
Hot Desking is a term that came about with Hot bunking on ships in the Navy. As businesses seek more ways to reduce their costs, they find themselves taking new and sometimes even radical approaches to meeting their goals. Cutting down on the largest expenditures is first in line. After all, a small percentage reduction in the biggest expense can save a lot of money. Employee accommodations are in the top 3 highest variable costs in most businesses. It can take lots of space and hardware to house an employee.
Market conditions has brought a new IT business philosophy onto the table as an option for reducing these space and hardware expenses. That strategy is known as hot desking. Hot desking uses a series of technologies, like VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastruture) and virtualization, and packages them together. Hot desking gives employees complete mobility with all of the data and applications necessary to facilitate their productivity. With this new mobility, they are free from the requirements of a desk space and the same computer. They can work literally anywhere, anytime on most any device. The more dynamic the work environment, the greater benefit hot desking will provide.
If your workplace runs on more than one shift, hot desking can cut your costs in half. It’s obvious that people who work at different times can share a single computer, but shift work is rarely that cut and dry. Often times, there are overlapping shifts, flexible hours, and the same employees working multiple shifts. When your workforce has complex personnel requirements, they shouldn't have to be bound by a single desktop computer. Hot desking allows workers to use any computer that is available and still have access controls to their own customized work environment. Wherever there is a computer available, they can work.
Some businesses only need part-time employees, but it can be resource intensive to provide each one with a desk and computer. Hot desking allows part-time employees to log-in anywhere there is a computer available. Since they are only in the office part of the time, 40 part time employees can easily share 20 computers and maintain their productivity.
Remote workers only spend 10% or less of their time actually in the office. It would be ridiculous to provide them with the same resources as someone who is in the office 40+ hrs. a week. Hot desking gives remote employees independence and freedom from a single workstation.
Those who spend most of their time on the road don’t find it necessary to have a permanent spot in an office. Dedicating space and resources to people who spend a fraction of their workweek in one place need a solution that is as mobile as their lives. Hot desking is the perfect travel partner for road warriors. Regardless of their device, whether its a smart phone, tablet, or laptop, their digital work environment can be with them.
Hot desking is the ideal solution for companies that have under utilized desktops. If you notice work spaces remaining empty for any period of time in your office, hot desking is a worthy of consideration. It’s a high tech solution to an old business problem. With hot desking, you can decrease costs while increasing mobility and productivity.
by David J. Moorman
Prior to the dial tone, operators would say, “Hello, who are you trying to reach?” and would connect your call. When the telephone systems became automated there was no longer an operator there to say, “Hello.” So, the dial tone was created as a user interface to let people know they could begin to dial.
In many ways, desktops have turning into a modern dial tone. We turn on our computer and we expect some sort of platform. This platform for most people is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and typically Microsoft Windows or the latest Apple OS. The term Desktop is now widely known. We are used to the look and feel of the Desktop. But the truth is, we don’t really need it. What we need are the applications on the computer like Microsoft Office or you accounting application. Similarly, we didn't need the telephone operator, we needed to be connected to the person we called.
So what is the computer equivalent to a dial tone?
Glad you asked. It’s so simple and quick, it may pass right over your head.
The modern operating system, capable of taking your desktop everywhere with the ability to accomplish every task you can think of and expands your entire digital business onto every device is (drum roll please)...
The Web or a single web page.
Windows is just a platform we use to connect us to the applications and files we need to accomplish our business tasks. The platform handles two things, navigation and as a human interface. Fortunately, we only need a browser to accomplish both of these tasks.
Other businesses like Google think so too. They’re putting some heavy weight behind creating their own browser based operating system called Chrome OS. The downside of their operating system is that it would require transitioning to their own tool set.
At DynaSis, we created an IT service built on a cloud platform called ITtility by DynaSis that allows businesses to use any operating system, and most browsers to access your applications and files. It doesn’t matter if you are on your iPad, iPhone, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows. Your IT system will just work; Anywhere, Anytime.
Do you worry about how Google’s system is run? Probably not. You just expect it to work, and it does. That should be how your IT solutions work. They just do. You can work from anywhere, on any device, and you don’t have to think about it.
ITility by DynaSis allows you to use all of your normal applications like Outlook right over the internet. It’s such a simple form of IT, it’s almost hard to comprehend.
Currently, your IT is setup so that your operator is in-house. But with ITility by DynaSis by DynaSis that operator can be outsourced. It would be ridiculous to pick up the phone and have a person connect your call every time. In ten years, you will be thinking the same thing about your current desktop solution. To turn your computer on and have all of your data and applications in one place. You have to maintain, protect, backup everything yourself. That type of operation is costly, rigid, and demanding.
In ten years, you will assume you can work from anywhere and not have to worry about how that system is maintained. When you outsource your IT to the cloud, you will have more time, money, and flexibility than ever before. Doing it the old way, having the operator in-house, will seem like an absurd throwback to the past.
by David J. Moorman
Wouldn't it be nice if the cost of IT was always an exact fit for your needs?
Chances are, if you aren't paying for your IT on a per-user basis billing model, you are paying too much. A per-user IT contract is an all-inclusive, holistic way of contracting your IT. The per-user model gives you the ability to dynamically scale your IT consumption up and down on a monthly basis. By including all of the hardware and software required that a business needs for an employee, businesses can ensure they are paying just the right amount for their IT solution. It will give your IT infrastructure unprecedented flexibility and alleviate the risk of building to much or not enough capacity. The steep costs of investing in depreciating hardware and software goes away, and you simply pay for the IT services as you need them. The ability to scale up and down in the "New Normal" business world we live in offers you the flexibility you need now and in the future.
Often, a 30 person business will build an infrastructure for 40 people. This means buying 40 PCs, 40 licenses for all of their software, and enough server and storage that will handle 40 people. Then they have a great quarter and business grows. Hiring employees can be a painful process in general but for IT there can be added pain of scalability. Adding 5 or 10 more computers with all of the added applications and services can be just as difficult as creating the original 30 user infrastructure. You even run the possibility of outgrowing your initial infrasturture setup.
With a per-user IT solution model, you can throw these worries out the door. As your business grows and you need more IT capacity and capabilities, adding to the infrastructure is easy.. Per-users IT solutions mean you can set up 10 or 20 more PC's fully licensed, and customized to your business. You don’t even have to think about it.
In other more unfortunate circumstances, you may have to make the difficult decision to downsize your business. Traditionally, with less people in your organization, you are still paying for the original capacity of your infrastructure. 25 of your 40 employees remain, but you are still left paying for a 40 computers and licenses. You are stuck with your depreciating technology and have lost your ROI on that initial investment.
Contracting IT as a per-user service will help to take the sting out of downsizing. Instead of sunk costs in IT, you can adjust your contract and be able to pay for one or 10 less users. You aren't stuck with the hardware, licensing, or expensive servers and storage that you do not need anymore. The office can downsize with the changing needs of your business regardless of size.
A per-user IT model can ensure your IT is just the right size for your business needs. The flexibility will allow you to have more time and money for concentrating on the parts of business that matter the most. Instead of being a burden, it will help drive success. With a per-user IT solution you will receive an infrastructure that will always fit your ever-changing business needs.
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