W I R E L E S S S O C I E T Y
Business Unplugged
With wi-fi, work will follow you anywhere you let it
By Jyoti Thottam
November 3, 2003
What if you could work online from anywhere, inside your office
or out? Check e-mail in the conference room, submit an expense
report while waiting for a delayed flight, instant message from a
coffee shop. With no more walls to demarcate your work space,
would you be more productive, or just worn out?
That's exactly what the employees at iAnywhere Solutions, a unit
of Sybase headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, are trying to
figure out. About 18 months ago the company, which makes software
for handheld devices, plunged headlong into the wireless world by
turning its entire campus into a giant wi-fi hot spot.
Employees—mostly in marketing and product development—with
wi-fi-enabled laptops (about half the 250 full-time staff at
headquarters) can access the Web at lightning speed from anywhere
in the building, no wires necessary.
What's so great about wi-fi that a company would reconfigure its
entire computer infrastructure around it? For openers, it's as
fast as a high-speed T1 line, more convenient than a mobile
phone, as addictive as a BlackBerry and nearly imperceptible.
What's not so great about it? Same thing. Wi-fi makes work that
much easier to do and that much harder to escape. "We're just
adapting to this new environment, adapting to what the technology
allows you to do," says Martyn Mallick, a product manager at
iAnywhere.
The company is one of a surprisingly small number of U.S. firms
that have installed wi-fi networks. Fewer than 5% of U.S. workers
use them today, according to an estimate by Gartner, a high-tech
research firm. With IT budgets squeezed, few companies are
rolling out new projects that don't immediately add to the bottom
line. But pioneers like iAnywhere are giving it a shot—and
giving the rest of us a preview of what the wireless workplace is
like.
So far, the biggest change has been felt in meetings, which used
to be decidedly low-tech. Employees used to jot notes in black,
spiral-bound paper notebooks and later transfer the most
important information to their computers. Now they're toting
around laptops, and instead of just taking notes at meetings,
Mallick and his colleagues are exchanging files, looking up stuff
on the Web—a description of a competitor's product, for
instance—and consulting their calendars to choose a time for
their next meeting. "Before, everyone would leave, and maybe 13
e-mails would go around," Mallick says. By dealing with questions
as they arise, staff members can move on "action items" as they
pop up. "Sometimes I would come out of a meeting with a page or
two of things to do," says Milja Gillespie, a marketing manager
at iAnywhere. "I can easily cut that in half."
Mallick admits, however, that attending a meeting full of people
communing with their laptops instead of one another can be
strange. "Sometimes I find it distracting," he says, "when I'm
giving a presentation, and everyone's typing away on their
laptops. It's a bit of a mind-set change, that people are
actually working, that this is the new workplace." It isn't too
hard to tell, though, when people are goofing off. "If they are
looking up and paying attention to you and making eye contact,
their body language tells a lot about whether they're part of a
meeting."
At some companies, says Gartner wireless analyst Phillip Redman,
the wi-fi distractions at meetings have got so bad that they use
the "say the name twice" rule, because that's often what it takes
to get someone's attention.
In a way, this is similar to the adjustment people went through
with cell phones and BlackBerries: a period of intense use (and
overuse) followed by a mellowing out as new ground rules emerge.
Gillespie, for example, says she leaves her laptop on her desk
when she and her colleagues are brainstorming. And Mallick says
certain tasks require the focused concentration an old-fashioned
desk provides. "I don't find I can do software development in an
airport," he says.
And, to be sure, wi-fi doesn't make sense for every employee.
iAnywhere didn't try to replace its wired network entirely, says
CEO Terry Stepien. Some of its engineers need even more bandwidth
than the fastest wi-fi networks can support, and the tech-support
staff need desks with phone lines, so they don't use wireless
laptops. (Eventually, some of them will be able to work
wirelessly, using an Internet phone system instead of a regular
phone.)
Perhaps the true promise (or hazard) of wi-fi for business, says
Gartner analyst Leslie Fiering, is its use as a "day
extender"—as yet another way to bring work home. Fiering
estimates that wi-fi raises the per-employee cost of a laptop by
as much as 4% a year, about $325, depending largely on wi-fi
access charges while traveling.
Page 1 of 2 1 | 2
Next > >
|