From the San Jose Mercury News
Like other valley stalwarts, including Intel and Sun Microsystems, Cisco is casting aside the cubicle culture that has thrived in the United States since the late 1960s. In its place, the company is embracing a new workplace design that saves space and money, and encourages collaboration among co-workers.
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Each morning, Intel employees will log onto the corporate network using wireless connections. Their phone numbers will follow them. White boards that employees use to sketch out business plans and project strategies will be outfitted with electronics so drawings and plans can be transferred to laptops and e-mailed to colleagues.
About 100 years ago, in 1999, I suggested something like this to my team lead. We were just about to outfit the wing with new desking and I suggested we might wan tto use open plan desking, reducing the height of the towers and cupboards so we could see each other. We’d kit all the desks with big screens and desk level power and have a charging socket for our handsets (using the Nortel mobile handsets which hooked into the internal telephone system). We would remove the standalone workstations and put them into the server room and use X11 to access them. Instead of pedestal drawers we would use lockable cupboards in a central location. We already had wireless at a massive 2 Mbps DSSS!
Ultimately it was poo-pooed because people wanted their name badges in a single place. Things were just not progressive enough back then. Which is one of the reasons I’m so enamoured of bedouin working now. I’ve been trying to do it for years.
Currently, I’m in the stone age technologically. While at home and with Infurious/Mac-Sys I’m in the 21st Century with 17″ MacBook Pro, iPhone, Wireless, VoIP, VideoConferencing and all the presence-software I can eat; during the day I’m tethered to a single desk, with a desktop computer, an awful clackety clackety keyboard, two low-res 17″ screens (I should count myself lucky there’s two), a desktop phone with a dozen buttons I don’t use and a rabble of wires behind the screens. And yes, just over a month ago I was upgraded to Windows XP.
Doing remote support using the tools provided is an exercise in frustration. Not having access to laptops, VoIP phones and having the expectation that I will call the United States on my personal mobile phone and then fight my way through the system to get the costs back is truly killing my enthusiasm. It’s not as if I don’t work for a technology division. Ah. Yes, it seems I do.
Steve put it plainly: it’s the difference between working for a technology company and working for a company that happens to use technology. While a CIO might shout about how we have the need to simplify and lead the business, there are areas which are simple to resolve (like information retrieval). These issues won’t be solved because they’re good for the customer (me) but not necessarily good for the IT department. It’ll make them work and learn. The will isn’t there to provide a modern work environment now as it wasn’t in 1999 in Nortel. I’m not even talking about cutting edge but rather just using the capabilities we have. i.e. having IP hardware phones on the desktop is a waste if they can’t provide IP softphones too. The latter would enable us to log in from anywhere and get our telephones as well as our desktops (though to be honest, they haven’t even sorted out the desktops thing yet).
To be fair, we don’t have cubicle-culture but it certainly a workstation farm. Rows and rows of screens. People’s heads in regular punctuation. Meeting room devoid of computers, projectors, anything but a normal whiteboard.
Stone tools and string, I tell you. Stone tools and string.
I asked for my team to get laptops with IP softphone software for the Christmas period so they could provide effective support over the Christmas period without having to trek into the office. Having almost given up on that – I’ve begged for the IP softphones alone.
It’s so frustrating.