Workshifting: a smarter way, a UC challenge

05 Oct 2012

Workshifting – essentially making not only the worker but his or her environment mobile and relocatable very easily – is becoming more and more popular. It’s not a pushover, though, from a technical point of view.

According to Citrix’ Global Workshifting Index – there’s a white paper on this attached – virtually all organisations will be allowing workshifting of some description by the end of next year. That’s very rapid considering it’s only a short time since ‘working from home’ encouraged a view that someone was slacking; the cultural change has been considerable.

A lot goes into this from the under-the-bonnet technical point of view, and it is on this area that many of the resources attached with this bulletin are focused. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), or consumerisation, is something that sounds appealing and if you believe the hype then everybody is doing it. Ask people who are actually involved in setting up the unified communications frameworks and you get a different story, though; large numbers of people still get issued with a work BlackBerry or iPhone simply because they’re on the ‘approved list’; if they want to use their own devices then in some cases they’re told that’s fine but they won’t get support on enterprise apps unless they use the enterprise’s supported technology.

This sounds reasonable enough, and this week we offer white papers on managing BYO and putting best practice in place. The security risks exist, there is no doubt, and nobody will do themselves any favours by insisting otherwise.

The benefits of workshifting are considerable, however. Mobility and enhancements to workforce continuity are high on that list. People whose workplace becomes unworkable because of fire or flood – and we’re not so far from winter when the flood risk starts to increase – can keep an enterprise running when a decade ago the same conditions would have put it out of business, possibly permanently. It improves productivity as long as it’s managed properly, mergers and acquisitions become easier if there is less premises and plant to assimilate and it’s a good tool for employee recruitment and retention.

We’d welcome discussion on the practical issues compared to the theoretical benefits on our LinkedIn group. Meanwhile we hope you find the resources attached useful.

Guy Clapperton
Editor

Related Whitepapers

Delivering corporate data securely on employee iPads™

Top 10 Reasons to Embrace Workshifting

Empowering business mobility through virtualization

Best practices to make BYOD simple and secure

BYO – Rethinking your device strategy

Workshifting: a global market research report