Re: | Page 107

Remote, Flexible As I sit on a train writing this, with full access to my email, remote server and messenger I may as well be in the office. It really demonstrates how far technology has come in past few years. The way that business and technology now integrates makes being in an office almost a faux pas. Business owners and employees can enjoy the flexibility of using every available moment, no matter where you are and not have to pay a huge amount for the privilege. To allow remote/flexible working, SMEs have been heavily investing in either bespoke or “off-the-shelf” products to support this method of working and stay ahead of their competitors. In fact, such has been the development of Cloud services since the initial boom of hosting that it is almost seen as unthinkable that an application doesn’t have a Cloud version. The requirement nowadays is that all software must be have a Cloud offering to stay relevant, which has forced application developers to hurry a hosted version of their application into production through fear of falling behind. This has prompted some serious questions about the impact, both good and bad, to businesses of the remote/flexible working model. I find myself discussing this very question a lot with clients (both current & potential), family and friends and the answer, as you can imagine, is never as simple as is it should be. There are two sides to this debate, the ‘enablers’ and the ‘realists’. I’ll tell you which camp I position myself in a bit later. Enablers outnumber the realists by a 9 to 1 and the simple reason is that remote/ flexible working has such a large range of benefits to both employers and employees that it seems like a match made in heaven. Employers benefit from workers being able to contribute at anytime, anywhere and by Wor king that Yahoo felt that the decision to allow flexible working had led to fragmentation on a grand scale. Side this with clear performance issues with remote workers and you have a crisis to fix, which will be followed with a harsh reaction from Yahoo em-ployees and an even harsher reaction from the outside world, branding the decision as “backward thinking”. providing this setup, the business is set to grow faster due to higher productivity. To the employee work/life balance is improved dramatically by not only being able to squeeze every possible moment out of everyday whilst travelling, waiting for meetings and even drinking coffee but to wake up and be at your computer, ready to work within moments. This makes for a very attractive offering and enables businesses to get the best people with such perks and compete hard with other suitors by offering flexible working to make the package all that much sweeter. Now for the realist view. I know you think this is now going to turn into a lesson about IT se 7W&