Remote Workers: 5 Questions to Start the Conversation

I’ve been spending a lot of my time talking with customers about remote worker strategies. Most are sending their employees home to work. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, for some customers it’s a very easy, short conversation (i.e., those that have already adopted a mobile-first strategy). For others, that discussion is a bit more involved. Customers who find themselves behind the 8-ball are not looking for a long, strategic, vendor-agnostic conversation. They want to know what they can do now. So, when conversations go that direction, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and dive into the tactical weeds. They don’t have time for a rip and replace. They require a vendor-specific conversation, that can include layered cloud services on top of their existing platform.

I’m always a little surprised when I meet with a company that hasn’t embraced a mobile-first philosophy when it comes to deploying its unified communications (UC) solutions. What does it mean to be mobile? We all know mobility is important. Once you have it, you really can’t imagine life before it. You know the saying: Work is what you do, not where you go. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every job function, but a lot of information worker-type jobs can be done from anywhere.

Historically, I’ve worked in an office setting where I grew familiar interacting with people and co-workers face-to-face. Having spent the bulk of my adult life working in offices and among other people, I grew accustomed to the luxury of dropping in on co-workers, chatting at the coffee machine, and walking down the hall to ask a co-worker a quick question. The casual drop-ins became the norm for me and my co-workers, and it was a critical part of how we worked together and created a strong and positive work culture.

The past few weeks have been interesting, as several customers have inquired about how to best prepare for a health pandemic. Within this same period of time, one of our industry’s largest conference, HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), cancelled its conference (with 42,000 registered participants) due to concerns about COVID-19, commonly known as coronavirus. Clearly, our industry—and society as a whole—are paying attention and investigating next steps for dealing with this outbreak.

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

At ConvergeOne, WAVES is our proprietary Methodology that guides each and every one of our collaboration engagements. WAVES is an acronym, with each letter representing a specific phase of the methodology. Each phase provides a specific contribution to the final outcome, which is a recommended solution that is tailored to the customer’s business and technology needs. The WAVES phases, which must be executed in order, are:

When you think of any one of these technologies – Internet of Things (IoT), Web Services, or WebRTC – by itself, each is a bright and shiny object that catches our attention. The capabilities of each of these technologies stand on their own and are very cool.

Gone are the days when the IT department was relegated to the bottom floor of an office to perform tasks that few in the organization understood. IT professionals today are the innovators, troubleshooters, cybersecurity watchdogs, data masters, and business process experts of the organization. The role of IT has become more critical and complex even as budgets have become compressed.

The stakes are high in engineering. You are tasked with driving innovation, but designs must also perform flawlessly in the real world. Collaboration is critical to the process. You must communicate design specifications, work across teams to identify and resolve potential failures, and test your design – all before you can begin product development. Further, you must do it all efficiently and cost effectively.

I have been working in the field of communications for a long time and have witnessed many significant changes over the years. Some ideas, like IP telephony, have revolutionized the industry. Others fell flat on their faces. WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is one of those ideas that falls into the revolutionary camp. While still in its infancy, I predict that within a very short period of time, WebRTC applications will become a daily part of how we communicate.