For several years the role of the corporate "Road Warrior" has been glorified as the invincible employee, somehow getting their jobs accomplished despite incredible odds to the contrary. The road warrior faced an endless onslaught of connectivity challenges, ever waging the constant battle to stay connected. Airlines like to celebrate the role, often handing out annual rewards for the truest warrior, and most traveled roadie.
But is the skill of the road warrior still adored by companies? We think the answer is no. While the ability to stay connected and appear to be at headquarters even though working from the road is admirable, the latest accolades go to those that are able to avoid the road, being productive through electronic collaboration with distant peers rather than traveling to see them. Indeed, the latest bragging rights go to employees most able to work from where they are stationed, and even more so the individual that can be effective at their job without leaving home.
With Death Comes New Life
Why has the road warrior fallen out of favor? Easy. Energy costs have so affected most bottom line travel costs, that it is increasingly difficult to justify the need for face-to-face meetings. Add to that the realization by most companies that travel equals some loss of productivity, and you have most CEOs and CIOs clearly asking the question: "is there another way?" And it turns out, there is.
As the once celebrated "Road Warrior" role dies, two new highly desirable roles are emerging: the "Collaborator" and the "Offsite Worker".
The Collaborator
The Collaborator is the person who can most effectively get their job done with a collaborative team of people who may be geographically distributed, and who leverage technology to be as effective as a team who are physically co-located.
On first blush, it may seem straightforward, after all what's the big deal? But anyone who has actually tried it knows that it's not as easy as it sounds. If we use a face-to-face meeting as the standard, there are many dynamics of such a meeting that are not apparent to the casual observer. Speech is one thing, and many of us have gotten accustomed to the audio conference call. Visual interaction is quite another matter.
It is a very interesting phenomenon when you have the opportunity to actually sit back and observe people in face-to-face meetings. Seemingly simple things such as hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language capture and convey enormous meaning. The ability to jump up and sketch something on the white-board is also of high importance. All these share a common result: they are effective communications, they complete the "experience".
The Collaborator then is the person who can conduct meetings which are not face-to-face, but not give up the effectiveness of visual interaction with colleagues. They leverage the technologies and tools available to still be effective with people who are not in the same location.
The Offsite Worker
Working at a regional site of a company is one thing. Working completely "offsite" from corporate locations, such as a home office, is quite another. Many companies struggle with how to take the same set of productivity applications that their headquarters employees have access to, and extend them to employees working at regional and branch office locations. The additional challenges of extending those same capabilities to employees working from remote and home offices pushes many IT architects to the brink. After all, the security implications alone are enormous, let alone the challenges of the home office environment.
Many IT departments struggle with the ability to manage the performance of applications inside the network which they control. Now we are asking them to provide and insure the same level of application experience extended to home networks, which are largely outside of their control.
Similar to the Collaborator, the successful Offsite Worker manages to be productive with colleagues even though they are not physical co-located.
Coming Soon....
In part 2 of this series, we will take a look at the characteristics and requirements of the Collaborator and the Offsite Worker. In part 3 we will take a look at specific tools and networking technologies to support Collaboration. Finally in part 4 we will look at Offsite Workers and some specific networking needs.
Jim Doherty is chief marketing officer at CipherOptics. Jim previously held leadership positions with Symbol Technologies and Cisco. He has more than 16 years of technical marketing and engineering experience and has led various marketing campaigns for IP telephony and routing and switching and network security solutions.
Neil Anderson is director of Enterprise Systems Engineering with Cisco. He has more than 20 years of broad experience in communications systems, including public telephone, mobile phone, and IP networks. At Cisco, Neil's focus is on business networks in the areas of network design, wireless networking, VoIP, and video-over-IP systems.
Jim and Neil are co-authors of the Networking Simplified series of books published by Cisco Press. See a sneak peek of a chapter from their book Cisco Networking Simplified, 2nd Edition here.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Secret weapons
I work with a lot of these people. Freelance writers have been the workers of the future for centuries now, most of the open source companies have lots of Offsite Workers, and your best bargain in PR is often a Collaborator at a small agency.
The bad news for the IT Department is that they find and bring their own communications tools. PBWiki, all the 37Signals apps, ad-hoc mailing lists, all the features that no-charge or low-cost services offer.
"Now we are asking them to provide and insure the same level of application experience extended to home networks" is setting the bar way, way too low. Cheap or free web sites offer a much higher level of application experience than the IT Department's apps.
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