Mobile tools for 21st-century decisions

Cisco System's TelePresence suite provides high-definition, full-size video conferencing. Photo / Supplied

It is an unlikely venue for a demonstration on the power of IT as a business tool.

Technology entrepreneur and Xero co-founder Rod Drury is addressing city council staff in a side room at the Marineland complex in Napier.

On his laptop, Drury opens a programme called Yammer, a corporate version of Twitter which allows workers from the same firm to "chat around a virtual water-cooler" about company business even though they may be working from different locations, or even in different countries.

Drury types a message: "Demonstrating Yammer at Marineland in Napier. No, really."

He says Yammer has become an important part of Xero's communication culture, and is popular with staff because it provides a sense of inclusion for workers spread across several offices, both here and overseas.

Xero staff also work from home or while travelling and Yammer allows them to "prove they're working" - an important requirement, psychologically, for workers who may be physically separated from their colleagues, Drury says.

Drury himself divides his work week between his Hawkes Bay home, Xero's Wellington headquarters and meetings in Auckland.

Chris O'Connell, chairman of the Telecommunications Users Association, was also at the Napier meeting.

He says mobile business tools such as Yammer not only help foster a sense of inclusion within a business, they also allow company leaders like Drury to appear to be in several places at once - a useful power for a businessman to have.

The next morning, in Auckland, Cisco country manager Geoff Lawrie is also talking technology for remote workers as he eyeballs a colleague from Australia.

A room at Cisco's Victoria Park base has been converted into a $600,000 "TelePresence" suite decked out with a bank of three 65-inch plasma screens.

The setup means Cisco's Sydney-based director of public sector consulting, Martin Stewart-Weeks, can project a life-size, high-definition, high-fidelity presence in Auckland without leaving his own office.

It is another example of the phenomenon of the technology-enabled, omnipresent businessman.

Joining Lawrie and Stewart-Weeks in near-real form is Baz Boorsma, Cisco's Amsterdam-based international director of public practice.

Lawrie says he convened the meeting, and invited journalists to attend, because he wants to kick-start debate on the role technology should play as Auckland moves towards its new Super City council structure next year.

The local body shake up, he says, is the ideal time to consider "the need to focus on building an intelligent electronic infrastructure for the city that transforms how we approach and solve challenges as diverse as transport congestion and the delivery of aged-case health services".

"Without this network as the core utility for the Super City, we will be restricted to trying to solve 21st-century problems by making industrial-age investments."

Stewart-Weeks says support for investing in Auckland's technology infrastructure can be found in the royal commission that recommended the Super City approach.

It said a "bold" approach was needed to position Auckland as a prosperous, internationally competitive, and environmentally sustainable city.

Cities have always been hubs for fostering commerce, a sense of community for their citizens, and creativity, but social, economic and technical problems have hampered Auckland's development, he says.

"There are profoundly interesting new ways to do those three fundamental things that cities have always done because of the nature of new communications technologies.

"They are game-changing across those three fundamental functions."

Stewart-Weeks says Cisco has worked on technology strategies for improving urban life with a number of cities around the globe through its involvement in the Connected Urban Development programme, an international initiative aimed at making the most of cities' broadband infrastructure.

The CUD programme is supported by former US president Bill Clinton's charitable foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative.

One CUD project Cisco believes could help fix some of Auckland's traffic and environmental issues involves a concept called smart work centres: rentable public office spaces spread across suburban parts of the city with high-speed internet, video conferencing, childcare facilities and other amenities aimed at making them attractive to workers as an alternative to commuting across town to their company's corporate headquarters.

The smart work centre has been piloted in Boorsma's home country of the Netherlands, where he says the goal has been to build a facility within biking distance of the homes of as many citizens as possible.

He says while a proportion of the workforce needs to travel to a certain location to perform their job, a large number of "knowledge workers" can work productively from anywhere using readily available broadband technology which can reroute their office direct-dial phone number and give them secure access to their corporate computer network.

"We've reached the point where we are possibly about to embrace new principles around the way we work."

He says the smart work centre concept is about more than replicating serviced offices in the suburbs and to be effective needs to be seen as a community asset.

"If you want to be innovative about creating an urban work environment where you have a lot of smart work centres, you should integrate [serviced office] offerings into that network, but to me [serviced offices] are places people rent temporarily and then get stuck in a traffic jams to get to," he says.

The Netherlands pilot found that, on top of the environmental impact of reducing commuter traffic, giving workers access to a suburban smart work centre cost companies about half as much as housing them in a corporate headquarters.

"That means that there is an incredible optimisation to be gained by employers who get this right," Boorsma says.

John Bone, TelstraClear's head of customer experience, says the telecommunications company agrees a move towards more community-based work is inevitable as people look for ways to enjoy the lifestyle benefits of avoiding daily commuting, and businesses and government begin to recognise the economic benefits.

"It really gets down to the attitude of businesses, but if they can get in sync with the Super City it's a real opportunity for them to deploy their funds efficiently and the same time transform people's lives."

Lawrie says Auckland already attracts smart international workers seeking the lifestyle opportunities New Zealand has to offer.

Forty per cent of Cisco employees living in New Zealand did not report to him, but held global positions with the company and simply chose to live here.

Many worked from home and travelled into work to use the telepresence technology to communicate with colleagues overseas when they needed to.

He says the smart work centre concept would enable this work flexibility to be taken to the next level.

Bone says TelstraClear has been trialling, and is beginning to market, technology products that allowed users to access their work computer networks securely and across any telecommunications network, not just TelstraClear's own infrastructure.

"We believe those things will become increasingly important. We use them already for staff to be more flexible in their work style."

Stewart-Weeks accepts convincing government to embrace the type of paradigm-shifting concepts at the heart of the CUD programme is not easy because bureaucratic thinking is hard to change.

"What you're dealing with here is much more [difficult than turning around] a supertanker. These are resistant policy and government structures which are continuing to take decisions about the disbursement of billions of dollars of funds without any recognition that the world they are building doesn't exist anymore."

While Cisco's business is building the type of broadband networks at the core of the type of cities the CUD strategies promoted, Lawrie says the company's motivation for pushing the concept was not self interest.

"The idea is to stimulate debate around the notion that there are some relatively substantial and apparently intractable problems that are facing the development of this city, that aren't in fact unique to Auckland," he says.

"There are a lot of cities around the world that have the same kind of challenges and many of them have approached them in a different fashion, and are relatively mature in how they are dealing with them. We want to say there are a lot of tail lights to follow around how cities are approaching these problems and it's incumbent on Auckland to start engaging in this kind of dialogue."

WORKING AS ONE

Goals of the Connected Urban Development programme:

* Work with major cities to develop innovative solutions using information and communications technologies to reduce carbon emissions.
* Forge blueprints, models, policies and practices that help create a successful, connected, competitive, attractive and sustainable 21st century city.
* Development and exchange of relevant ideas between CUD cities and beyond.

ON THE WEB
connectedurbandevelopment.org