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The technologies exist to create the borderless business.
The question is, how should you implement them?

From police forces to pension providers, universities to utilities, organisations of all kinds are discovering the benefits of borderless business. Spurred by the promise of improved services for users and customers, increased efficiencies and unprecedented flexibility and agility, these companies are working with trusted partners like Computacenter to design and deploy the most appropriate solutions for their particular business needs.

But as we saw in the strategy feature on page 10, different companies are at different stages of readiness for borderless working, and so an effective partner must be able to offer help at the appropriate level. Andrew Vize, Computacenter’s sales operation manager, says the company can offer the full life cycle of borderless business enablement services to its customers. “At the very lowest level, we can help them to select devices that are the most appropriate for their particular business needs,” he says. “That involves evaluating and procuring products for customers based on their specific priorities – whether those are cost, ruggedness, functionality or something else. One firm, for example, wanted very rugged mobile devices because it knew they would get thrown around a lot by its mobile operatives out on the road.”

At the next level up, Computacenter can help with device configuration. At its solutions centre in Hatfield, the company can pre-configure devices and ship them ready to use. On top of that, it can also support those devices – replacing damaged or faulty items within 24 hours if necessary.

Then there’s the development of application solutions that are fine-tuned to use those mobile devices. That could mean fairly simple messaging solutions that push emails out to Windows or Blackberry devices, it could mean the integration of voice over IP with those devices so a company can introduce the concept of ‘presence’ (knowing where a user is at any time and routing voice calls and other communications appropriately), or it could mean developing a complete solution for collaborative working. “Again we have experience at all these levels,” says Vize.

At a higher level still, Computacenter will support customers’ mobile devices as a managed service. “A service like this becomes particularly important when a device has access to really secure data,” he says. “So, for example, if a customer’s employee leaves a BlackBerry in the back of a car we can remotely access and disable it to make sure that nobody else can use it. We can also provide more traditional support activities such as dealing with access problems and so on. Indeed, if customers come to us with a particular set of problems, we can try to aggregate our services to provide them with the most appropriate solution as one overall outsourced managed service.”

Overcoming resistance

Pierre Hall, Computacenter’s distributed computing practice director, says the company can also help customers with their training requirements and overcoming user resistance. “For example, we run a mobility strategy workshop where we talk about a company’s infrastructure, the type of workers they have and how best to serve them. We can also conduct a training needs analysis, so customers can understand the impact of technologies on their users and processes, then come up with the most suitable vehicle to deliver the training and communications they need. It’s critical that users embrace the technology, otherwise the solution won’t work. Providing floorwalkers and helpdesk support is a big part of that, too.”

So just how has the company helped particular customers address specific problems?

For one Computacenter customer, life and pensions giant Aegon, the key challenge was to mobilise its 350-strong UK sales force while at the same time ensuring the security of sensitive corporate and customer data. Indeed, this was absolutely essential given that the company is subject to both Sarbanes- Oxley and Financial Services Authority regulations, as well as the Data Protection Act. Computacenter developed and deployed a secure VPN access solution with two-factor authentication that allows Aegon’s sales staff to access corporate applications over WiFi, 3G or fixed broadband in a way that complies with both external and internal security requirements. In addition, the company has helped the sales staff to understand the system and assure its successful adoption. In this case, Computacenter was responsible for technical consultancy, design, implementation, project management, user support services and training, device maintenance and third-party supplier management.

Security was also top of the agenda for a government customer. Hall says: “We worked with one government agency to mobilise some of its applications. To ensure the solution was secure, we worked with one of the Government’s top security advisors to ensure the infrastructure stack would be compliant with the level of security required. In that case, we helped with project management, consultancy, design and training.”

For other clients, the key driver has been to reduce the environmental impact of their business activities. As one of the world’s leading utilities, EDF Energy is facing increasingly close scrutiny on environmental issues. So Computacenter deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 as part of a technology pilot programme. The solution allows workers to know one another’s location, instant message each other, videoconference on the desktop and collaborate online. This has significantly reduced the need for travel and face-to-face meetings.

Hall says: “Effectively, we’ve deployed the concept of presence – knowing where a user is – along with corporate instant messaging and desktop videoconferencing. And this is truly borderless because we’ve given the organisation a very rich medium of communication. Studies have shown that typically up to 80 per cent of communication is nonverbal, and with this kind of system users can flip into videoconferencing instantly if they need it. As well as reducing environmental impact, this type of solution has the potential to improve worker productivity considerably.”

Improving productivity

For many companies, improving worker productivity is the number one driver for going borderless. Hall says: “For example, in the past we’ve helped a number of police forces. Their aim has been to enable more visible policing and the key to that is reducing the amount of time officers need to be at the station filling in forms. So our concern was to figure out how they could deliver the same services without so much paperwork. That led to us delivering the ability for them to do stop and search, personnel checks and car registration checks at the roadside, via a mobile platform. The key is to make the solution as feature-rich and responsive as existing methods – or more so. That means understanding what the organisation is trying to do, the work styles of its users, the limitations of existing systems and processes and then developing a solution that transcends those problems.”

For others still, the ability to work in a borderless fashion has come about as the by-product of a wider goal. One company, in the housing sector, had 1,000 users at 80 sites, so that support often meant technical staff travelling to remote locations. It was becoming clear that the legacy infrastructure could prevent the company from meeting its future business objectives. Computacenter's solution was a standardised IT environment with remote support for users. That had the additional effect of giving the customer the option to allow staff to work remotely, reducing the need for so many regional offices.

Vendor relationships

One reason Computacenter is well placed to work with such a diverse range of customers is that the company has close relationships with many vendors – and quite a few minor ones – while being tied to none. Camilla Sunner, the company’s service portfolio director, says: “We are very flexible with regards to the solutions we deliver. Our vendor independence means we can support and help them choose among all the technologies on the market. At the same time, we can bring our experience to the table and say that given a customer’s particular situation, we would probably recommend X, but if you have a strong preference for Y then we’re happy to work with that as well.”

Hall adds: “At the same time, the strong relationships we have with the vendors allow us to understand their roadmaps, which means we can advise companies in a way that protects their investments. If a customer believes it is going to need particular capabilities further down the line, we can advise on the best technologies and vendors for them to work with.

“We have experts who really understand the portfolio of products available, and the strategies of the major vendors who drive the market in this area. For example, we’re a significant Microsoft Gold Partner, a Nortel Gold Solutions Provider and a Cisco Gold Partner as well. Since most organisations have some combination of these vendors’ technologies, we can use our position to help them leverage these investments and reach a level of maturity where they can start to deploy some of the capabilities they require into their infrastructure.”

Even for customers who are not at the stage where they can refresh their infrastructure to better enable borderless business, Hall says Computacenter is able to help them mobilise their legacy applications to a certain extent. “For example, part of my team’s portfolio is looking at application virtualisation technologies such as Citrix. So if an organisation is not able to develop applications on a mature borderless infrastructure today, we can probably still help it to virtualise its applications and deliver them to mobile devices in a way that’s very cost-effective.”

But it is the prospect of truly unified communications and borderless business that is the most exciting for organisations, and Hall says the best way to communicate that excitement is to actually see those technologies in action. At its Solutions Centre in Hatfield, Computacenter has built demonstration facilities to give customers the chance to do just that.

As Hall says: “Our working demonstration of these technologies at Hatfield helps customers to visualise and put into context what these technologies can do for their businesses. And the big pull is the quality of the user experience, because if something is not easy to use, human nature tends to find a way round it. Fortunately, the latest technologies for borderless business are both great to use and boost business productivity considerably.”