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Time for a Virtual Office

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The good thing about IT is that it helps during both good times as well as

bad times. When business was booming, there was a need to figure out how

technology could help grow the business. Now, when times are bad and companies

are reeling under pressure of the economic meltdown, there's a need to find out

how technology can help to not only sustain the business, but also lower

expenses.

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So this is the time to think innovatively about how IT can help do this, and

the challenge is to do it without letting any prior biases hinder your thoughts.

Don't shoot down an idea, no matter how silly it sounds. For all you know, even

the silly ideas you shot down during good times could be your saviors now. In

order to get those ideas, you have to foster an environment that encourages

innovative thoughts and ideas. For instance, one company I spoke to in Bangalore

has reduced its employee to desktop ratio in the office, so that only a fixed

number of employees would be able to come to office at any day. Rest would have

to work from home.

The work from home concept hasn't really gelled with a lot of Indian

enterprises till now, even though it's a standard practice amongst a lot of

international organizations. Indian companies still stick to the old school of

thought that employees won't work if they don't come to office. Maybe that was

the case during good times, but now, when any cost cutting idea is a good idea,

this might be successful. The challenge for the IT department is to ensure that

it's convenient for employees to be able to access the company's IT

infrastructure remotely, and it doesn't put too much pressure on them in terms

of cost. For instance, it shouldn't happen that employees have to upgrade their

Internet bandwidth at home to ensure they can connect to the office VPN. Plus,

you'll need to work closely with HR and top management to build the case for it.

The idea is to try and build a virtual working environment for employees so

that they can work from anywhere. Video conferencing, VoIP, online

collaboration, and SaaS are all good candidates that could make this possible.

You just have to ensure that your IT infrastructure, especially your WAN links

are optimized to take on the extra load. So that's what our cover story on

enterprise WAN management is all about this time. Though WAN management is an

old concept, it has a whole new meaning in today's time, because it could just

make the virtual office concept work.

Anil Chopra, Editor



anilc@cybermedia.co.in

And we could see a paradigm shift in the way organizations work after the

slowdown.

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