Transforming your organisation into a borderless business opens new opportunities and makes you more agile – if you take the right approach
The walls that once contained and defined our businesses are crumbling away. For the past 15 years, advances in computing and communications technology have been steadily driving the twin juggernauts of globalisation and mobility. The result is that, today, organisations are thinking beyond the separate issues of how to mobilise a particular part of their work force, facilitate multi-location working or enable particular services to operate 24/7. Instead, companies are beginning to ask how technology can help them create businesses that are truly borderless.
Camilla Sunner, Computacenter’s service portfolio director, believes that whatever organisations’ reasons for creating borderless businesses, they all have similar requirements.
WHY READ THIS?
- You want greater agility for your business by removing physical borders.
- You need to develop a global presence for your organisation.
- It's important that you can attract the best staff by offering flexible working conditions.
“Regardless of the drivers, businesses are trying to create an organisation where everyone is able to work from wherever, through whatever device, whenever they need to. At the end of the day, although the needs of specific organisations will be different, the key components of their overall solution are likely to be similar, irrespective of the type of business they are in or the sector in which they operate,” she says.
Before considering solutions, however, it's important to understand why an increasing number of businesses are going to need to develop a borderless business strategy, what that strategy might encompass and what issues and challenges organisations will most likely face along the path to implementation.
Key drivers
One of the key drivers for borderless business is globalisation. Where a company has a global customer base, a global supply chain and/or a global presence (or intends to gain these by means of expansion, merger or acquisition), there is a clear need to be able to work across international borders. Most organisations today operate globally in some sense, even if they’re only using an offshore company to enable 24/7 support or having their products manufactured inexpensively in places like China. But with M&A activity running high and expected to peak this year at around $5 trillion globally (according to Ernst & Young), more and more companies are having to adapt to the realities of global business.
Sunner says: “Certain sectors are much farther ahead. The professional services sector, for example, is very highly consolidated with lots of acquisition activity across the globe. However, other sectors and types of business have yet to be affected in such a big way.”
The other key driver is mobility. There are plenty of businesses which might not describe themselves as global, but for whom operating without borders – in the sense of giving some or all staff the ability to access company systems and applications irrespective of location – is a definite requirement.
A decade ago, mobile and remote working in most organisations was limited to a sales force of ‘road warriors’ or senior managers who wanted the option to ‘telework’. Today, a growing proportion of the work force wants to be able to work remotely, and increasingly on devices of their own choosing. And where talent is short, companies will have no option but to respond if they want to attract the best people with the skills their business requires.
Pierre Hall, Computacenter’s distributed computing
practice director, says: “Survey results have shown that
over three-quarters of respondents state flexible and
remote working is something that would attract them to a
role. I asked a group of around 30 customers at a recent
seminar if they had a flexible working policy in place and
only five hands went up. But the technology is becoming
less complex and easier to deploy.
User expectations
“Organisations face a bottom-up drive for change,” says Hall. “Users’ expectations on a number of fronts are increasingly forcing them to change.”
First of all, there’s the growing social agenda around the environmental benefits of remote working – less travel means less pollution, and less need for physical office space means less use of energy for lighting, heating, appliances and maintenance. Then there are the demands of modern professionals around work-life balance. And finally, there’s the consumerisation of technology which is pushing ever smarter, more functional devices out to the masses and nurturing the expectation that they will be able to use the same technologies for work.
And as competition for skills becomes fiercer, the issue becomes all the more acute for organisations. There are a lot of sectors where talent management is talked about but hasn’t yet taken hold. But that’s changing because companies are starting to realise that taking care of their people is really important if they want to attract the best and hang on to them.
Then, of course, there are the cost drivers for the business itself to adopt borderless working, not least of which is the potential saving on office expenditure. Hall recounts the tale of one Computacenter customer that reaped considerable cost benefits by mobilising its work force. “This was at the early stage of mobile working, around five years ago. By mobilising its workers, the organisation found that not only was it able to give staff a better work-life balance, but also gained by leasing out its own offices that had been freed up in the process. I think this is a trend that’s set to grow sharply, with more customers asking how they can reduce the cost of real estate while maintaining an effective working environment. And with today’s technologies you can make employees’ experiences as feature-rich as if they were in the office.”
Improved agility
Other benefits of going borderless include improving the flexibility of your business – since when you’re not tied to a specific location, it becomes more straightforward to set up ad hoc project teams quickly, using the best people, wherever they may be. And that agility can extend to encompass your entire supply chain.
Andrew Vize, Computacenter’s sales operations manager, says: “For example, a manufacturer and a number of its suppliers can all look at and contribute to the same planning forecast, the same production schedules, all updated in real time.” In turn, he adds, real-time data in itself adds business value. “When you have access to data that’s live, the value of that data is so much greater than had it been updated a week ago,” he says.
In addition, equipping already-mobile workers with the ability to access corporate systems and applications, and synchronise data, can improve efficiencies, reducing the need for them to return to a central location frequently and enabling you to manage their workflow and list of jobs in real time while they’re out and about.
SECURITY ISSUES
Undoubtedly one of the biggest management concerns most organisations have with going borderless is security. When company data is being accessed from a multitude of devices, many of which are mobile, how can you ensure the security of sensitive company or customer information?
Making sure you have a clear security policy which all staff are aware of (possibly with individual penalties for non-compliance) is a good start. But of course, people are fallible – which is why vendors have been focusing heavily on this area in recent years to develop security and authentication technologies that are inherently more robust than in the past.
For example, today you can deploy mobile devices that can be remotely disabled and wiped clean if lost or stolen. And, by appropriately managing the application layer, you can centrally control which data is permitted to be sent to which workers on which devices and in which locations.
“Organisations should be managing the services they want their users to use, without worrying too much about the devices they’re running those services on” says Computacenter's Pierre Hall. “So the question is really about how to build an appropriate infrastructure with a well-maintained, secure application layer.”
Borderless challenges
As all of these trends continue to take hold, organisations will have little choice but to adapt accordingly to maintain their competitiveness. But, although the technology is becoming more straightforward to deploy, going borderless is not without its challenges. Broadly, these challenges fall into three categories – technical/operational, managerial and cultural. Of these, the technical/operational challenges – such as ensuring adequate training, support, capacity, functionality and systems management – are perhaps the least acute. If a business works with a trusted partner such as Computacenter, which has the necessary experience, that partner can help develop appropriate solutions in all these and other areas, even delivering them as a hasslefree managed service (see solutions feature, page 14).
One question many people will ask is how urgent these challenges really are for their own organisations. Undoubtedly, they are coming and they represent the future of how we will all do business. But it’s clear most organisations have some way to go yet before they are truly able to call themselves borderless. Hall thinks we will see companies deploying the necessary technologies in several phases.
“The move to borderless business will be via a phased deployment because there a number of things you need in place to be able to exploit the technology effectively,” he says. “Some of our customers have been able to implement appropriate technology in a fairly seamless fashion because they have already spent years rationalising and standardising their architecture. Your back-end systems and infrastructure need to be fairly mature to be able to layer this stuff on.”
One of the key concepts to understand when attempting to enable borderless business is that of ‘presence’ – ensuring the system knows where any individual is at any time, and whether they’re available, so that all communications (whether phone calls, messages, files, data, to-dos, etc) can be routed to them in the most appropriate manner. For example, to use this technology to make a telephone call, the corporate directory has to be set up appropriately within your IT systems.
“The directory is the cornerstone of the presence idea, and on top of that you can start to layer on functionality such as integrating, email, portal technologies, instant messaging and videoconferencing,” says Hall. “So at the moment, a lot of customers are asking what they need to get their infrastructure ready.”
EFFECTIVE TEAMWORK
A key cultural challenge for the borderless organisation is how to ensure effective team-working among people who are not located in the same place, and may potentially also be in different time zones or work for different organisations such as partners or suppliers. There are many answers here – some technical and some managerial.
Technical solutions might include the increased use of systems such as social networking, desktop videoconferencing, collaborative whiteboarding, virtual meetings, etc. Such technologies are evolving quickly as vendors work to respond to businesses’ need to replicate, in a virtual space, the social cohesion found among traditional teams. And although most people would contend that some level of physical, face-to-face interaction among workers is still important, in future those face-to-face interactions might be limited to monthly, quarterly or even yearly get-togethers, more likely of a social nature.
It is the task of managers to assess the specific needs of their teams, help them to work effectively together in this new environment and ensure no individuals are feeling isolated, unhappy or unsure of their roles.
Management concerns
But what about the other issues mentioned – managerial and cultural? Some of the managerial challenges are around issues such as how devices are paid for, managed and maintained in this new environment, how managers can ensure remote workers have appropriate network connectivity, how they can best deploy staff and how they can build in flexibility for the future. Again, an experienced partner such as Computacenter – with knowledge of how others have tackled similar problems and an understanding of different vendors’ roadmaps – can provide considerable assistance in such areas.
While security may be the number-one problem in the minds of managers (see box), in fact it is the cultural issues around borderless business that often throw up more difficult challenges. The first of these is the changing relationship between employer and employee.
It is a considerable cultural shift for some managers to relinquish their traditional oversight of their teams. How do you know they’re working when they’re supposed to be? Again, there are some technical solutions (such as monitoring staff remotely by measuring keyboard activity or time on the phone) but in most cases the answer lies not in staff surveillance, but in putting more trust in workers and measuring them on their outputs rather than on ‘desk time’. Equally, employees themselves often need to adapt to a more self-reliant form of working, where they must manage their own time effectively without a manager breathing down their neck for eight hours a day.
Ensuring effective teamworking is a challenge (see box)
and there is also the problem that, as businesses
increasingly operate 24/7, their staff might feel pressured
into working longer than their contracted hours. The way to
combat such perceived intrusiveness of work into the
private life of staff is to make clear your commitment to
improving, not upsetting, people’s work/life balance.
Essentially, that means making sure both managers and
employees know and respect when particular individuals
are ‘offline’ from work.
None of these challenges is insurmountable. And, as is evident from the features and case studies elsewhere in this issue, the phased deployment Hall spoke about is well under way, with Computacenter helping numerous customers – at different stages of enabling borderless business – to move forward into this brave new world with confidence. The question for many organisations today is no longer if, but when and how.
