Home Workplace Pre-Deployment Projects

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing emphasis on applying green principles to information technology and indeed to business operations at large. One area of renewed interest is enabling more employees to work from home for more of the time.

We are pleased to announce a joint venture between Workplace Technologies Corporation (WTC), a strategic technology management consulting firm based in Long Beach, and Midcom, based in Anaheim and one of southern California’s premier information technology service providers. This venture will focus on an entirely new, and highly multi-disciplinary, approach to the home workplace and one quite different from traditional “telecommuting” efforts.

WTC has been engaged in home workplace research and development activities for more than 15 years while Midcom has the ability to deliver large-scale information technology projects. Believe that our complimentary capabilities will permit us to offer enterprises a more viable approach to deploying not individuals, but rather whole workgroups, to the home workplace.

The section below provides a summary of our joint packaged offering, a small scoping project which is intended to help your company determine its best path forward to the home workplace, the required technical architecture, the business case and how best to manage related risks.

We would appreciate the opportunity to provide a more detailed presentation to your business and information technology leadership.

Home Workplace Pre-Deployment Project

Finding ways to make your business more efficient – as well as more competitive and environmentally friendly – is a never-ending challenge. How can you overcome today’s problems and best position for tomorrow?

 A Different Vision of the Home Workplace

We believe that deploying to the home workplace whole workgroups of employees, who work mostly with information, will bring major environmental, energy and economic (E3) benefits to your company – as well as to the planet. It will also increase operational flexibility as well as employee creativity and satisfaction.

We also believe that large-scale (versus “boutique”) commitment to the home workplace requires a balance of human factors, workflow, technology and logistics. It requires another kind of balance too – workers optimally are located on average three days per week at home, one day at a (shared) group workplace near their home and one day at their original office. Called the 3-1-1 Plan, this approach can result in 40-60% savings in total facility costs per employee, as well as major energy savings.

Our vision of the “Home Workplace” is significantly different than the widely espoused concept of “telecommuting”, the proponents of which have been declaring it to be the “coming thing” and the “next trend” for the past 20 years! However, the reality does not match their claims. Most “telecommuting” projects ultimately include only a tiny fraction of an enterprise’s workforce and, usually, even those participants end up working at home only a few hours per week. Yet, these projects are routinely declared by their proponents to be great successes. The problem, of course, is that using criteria such as this the rescue of passengers from the RMS Titanic could be declared a great success too…

 A New Service Offering

Workplace Technologies Corporation (WTC) is a strategic planning and technology management consulting firm which has been serving large enterprises and government institutions for 15 years. WTC principals each have 25-30 years experience in such areas as information technology architecture, open systems, information management, human factors, organizational development and logistics. This highly multi-disciplinary team has practical experience in managing programs and projects with values up to $300M for clients including McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard and Amdahl/Fujitsu. The WTC team also has had extensive past involvement with the home workplace, both as system integrators and as users, extending back to the early 1980′s.

WTC has developed a unique vision of how the home workplace can benefit individuals, SMB’s, large enterprises and governments based both on extensive research in this field and also a wealth of practical experience.

Leveraging our collective experience with information technology, information management, computer-telephony integration, human factors, organizational development and logistics we can jointly provide a fast, accurate and frank assessment of how your organization can best adopt the home workplace as a part of your overall business and technology strategy.

This results in:

  • identification of the target workgroup for your pilot deployment;
  • a clear statement of the business case; and
  • a detailed deployment plan.

 Benefits of our Approach

1. Our approach is highly multidisciplinary, balanced across human factors, workflow, technology and logistics; we are not human resources consultants masquerading as “telecommuting consultants”.

2. Our core competencies in technology management enable us to select the best technologies, architecture and deployment approach so as to minimize disruption of work patterns and the incremental IT support requirements.

3. Our deliverables provide the foundation for a quick and low-risk pilot deployment in terms of both business and technology factors.

 Scope and Cost

A Midcom-WTC Home Workplace Pre-Deployment Project costs $30K and is normally delivered in a 3-4 week time span. The client then has the option of managing its own deployment or retaining us to conduct it on their behalf.

Contact

For more information, contact

Dan Perley
President
Workplace Technologies Corporation
(562) 494-8782
dperley@mtc-stm.ca