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The Flexible Revolution (News - Alert)

By Brendan B. Read,
Senior Contributing Editor

If there is one word that is the key to getting through this current economic climate and to enable taking advantage of opportunities when conditions turn brighter, that is flexibility.

Call it the “flexible revolution.” With a recovery that promises to be slow and painful, firms that are encumbered by expensive fixed buildings or hardware, processes and thinking are unlikely to make it and if they do they will struggle. Companies that have instead embraced flexibility: opex not capex, leasing and hosting software; hardware, and hardware only if necessary, video/Web conferencing not travel, and telework not bricks-and-mortar, are more likely to shine through. Why? Flexible solutions and techniques are less expensive, more adaptable to changing conditions, and provide greater disaster survivability than hardware/infrastructure-intensive products and methods.

The past boom and the milder miasma punctuated by tragic events set the stage for the Flexible Revolution. The dot-com blowout followed by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks began waking up organizations to the harsh reality that rigid assets and approaches sometimes literally crumble in a world of rapid change, upheaval and disaster.

In the rebound that followed smart entrepreneurs, firms and management began developing and implementing flexible tools and methods that are now becoming popular. Witness the hosted/software-as-a-service boom as exemplified and evangelized in the CRM space by Salesforce.com (News - Alert) and which has attracted me-tooers. This heightened awareness opened customers’ eyes to other on-demand offerings such as IVR and routing platforms. A similar evangelism by Cisco (News - Alert) with telepresence is doing likewise for videoconferencing where the major stumbling block is less technical and cost but that everyone wants to use these tools rather than travel.

At the same time teleworking, led by adoption in contact centers, is finally reaching critical mass to where it is now setting off a chain reaction throughout corporations. There are more teleservices companies that offer home working while growing numbers of companies that are enabling it for their internal staff than ever before.

Yes the percentages of telecommuters are small – 10 percent to 15 percent at best – compared to those who must squeeze themselves into a tax-subsidized environment-killing cars and lesser-evil mass transit to accomplish the same tasks in organization-subsidized offices that they can done at home. Yet as any revolutionary will tell you, such numbers are sufficient to build momentum. That also goes for software and videoconferencing.

Granted, of these flexibility-enabling products and techniques is exactly new. Phone (News - Alert) companies have long offered hosting switching (i.e. Centrex). Journalists like me have teleworked for years. My first computer was ahead-of-its-time: the Tandy TRS-80/T200 fully loaded (with built-in modem) clamshell laptop supplied to me in 1988 by my newspaper so I could work remotely. And videoconferencing has long been touted as a tomorrow technology that never seems to have arrived.

Making the difference for hosting, conferencing and teleworking have been a coming together of technology, experience and awareness. The rapid evolution of voice over IP/SIP and the commercial and residential broadband boom have given employees and managers access to the same capabilities, processes and internal compliance via hosting and teleworking as they had enjoyed with premises-based products and in offices. These include app-sharing, instant messaging, monitoring, staffing/training, presence/unified communications and workforce management. Fewer tasks therefore need to be done by having people physically present.

These solutions also give them peace of mind. Broadband-enabled remote control tools such as West’s Locked-Down Desktop that is used by its home agents prevent access to non-work applications, thereby providing greater security.

In turn, experience with hosting, conferencing and telework leads to more of it deployed and more effectively. And as others see what those who have used these solutions and tools have achieved in the way of greater results, the smart ones among them will likely adopt these methods and products.

The case for joining the “flexible revolution” is there, in your bottom line now and going forward. The question that remains: for organizations and suppliers alike is this: are you going to climb on board or do you want risk being left behind?

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