There’s an interesting whitepaper of sorts published on Microsoft.com called the “Untethered OrganizatiOn”. It focuses on the value of providing employees with mobility & and strengths of concepts like telecommuting & VPN like technologies such as DirectAccess.
Here’s an excerpt:
Are executives at communications giant Sprint Nextel leaders or followers when it comes to workplace flexibility? The answer de-pends on your point of view.
Sure, the Overland Park, Kan.-based company is a trailblazer in em-powering one-time desk jockeys to work whenever and wherever they choose, whether that’s home, a customer site, the office, or almost anyplace else with Internet access. But when decision-mak-ers rolled out the Sprint Mobile Workforce initiative back in 2004, it was at least partially in reaction to changes that employees were implementing on their own.
“We’ve always been big proponents of flexible work arrange-ments,” says Scott Woodrome, a strategy manager at Sprint Nextel. “But one reason we launched the Sprint Mobile Workforce program was because people were already working where they wanted, when they wanted, and how they wanted.”
Sensing an opportunity, the company decided to embrace rather than resist that trend. It pulled together a project team of IT, HR, and facilities leaders, along with representative front-line employees. It deployed a sophisticated unified communications solution based on Microsoft Office Communications Server (now Microsoft Lync) and Microsoft Exchange Server, so workers could connect from anywhere via Web-based telephony, online conferencing, instant messaging, and e-mail. And it gave its office sites a top-to-bottom makeover, replacing fixed desk assign-ments with a smaller set of unassigned work stations that employees could use temporarily whenever they came in from the road.
The impressive results have included some $9.3 million a year in communications savings, $30 million a year in real estate savings, and a workforce that’s not only happier but significantly more productive too. “People just get more done when they don’t have to spend time on things like commuting and business travel,” Woodrome observes.
Sprint Nextel’s experiences are but one example of an ongoing revolution currently transforming the world of work. Call it the rise of the untethered organization. For centuries, most office work-ers have done their job in the same place, at the same time, in the same way, with the same tools day after day. Today, however, corporate employees are less and less tied to a specific desk, device, or location. And as businesses are increasingly discovering, that greater freedom to roam can produce dramatic increases in productivity.
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Download the entire document here:
- WHITEPAPER: Building the Untethered Organization (.PDF, 1.04MB, 10pgs)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/F/9/8F90DD25-47A6-4CA3-95A4-D2813987F1BD/Building%20the%20Untethered%20Organization.pdf
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