June 6, 2008

Ending Slavery In the Work Place: Set People Free From Wires

If you are still primarily "a wired" office, the employees you have tethered to desktops are missing out on being more productive in the office.

In addition, your company is probably wasting real estate with empty offices/cubicles and limiting the potential of transient employees..

By planning a strategic wireless strategy in your office, you'll find that productivity will increase (meetings can happen anywhere; all employees have network resources); the concept of hotel-ing gives you flexible use of your office space.

There's several companies with quite successful wireless network strategies. Information Week writes Truly transforming the workspace extends beyond installing access points and providing laptops, to physical reconfiguration. Take Capital One's Future of Work program. The financial services firm's 360-acre, eight-building campus almost doubled the number of employees it could house, from 650 to 1,100, by adopting the concept of hoteling. Rather than being assigned a specific location, employees who participate in this optional program have access to a generic cubicle, as well as conference rooms and open areas. Space is essentially overbooked. Each employee is assigned a telephone number that flows to a Cisco voice-over-IP phone and/or BlackBerry. The WLAN is the primary medium for network access.

Two parts of a wireless strategy that are critical are: security and your people.

If your wireless network is NOT secure, your data/communication is exposed and you could be attacked from any smart person with malicious intent - right from your office parking lot.

The other part of a wireless strategy are the human dimensions. Your staff. Your staff need be be trained in how to best maximize their wireless network and corporate policies for a "hotel-ing" concept.

tags: network , security , wireless | 0 comments