Tim Price-Walker, Enterprise Business Consultant at Steljes, recently spoke at the Involve Visual event on how the modern work place is changing, what the key business drivers are that are accelerating the need for improved collaboration and the business value that can be delivered as a result of having a collaboration strategy:
Visual collaboration is changing the way we work and is now essential to every organisation, enabling them to ensure the rapid flow of business ideas, understanding, knowledge and expertise. Today’s reality is that traditional in-person meetings are time-consuming, expensive, and fast becoming environmentally unacceptable. Visual collaboration tools free your organisation to bring together colleagues, suppliers and partners to resolve issues, engage with customers and to help create opportunities.
Collaboration drives greater operational transparency, streamlined work processes, and stronger interpersonal relationships: people become true colleagues, rather than merely dispersed co-workers. Ultimately, this opens the door to better business: improved efficiency; innovation; growth; service agility; change management; and profitability.
But finding better ways to enable high-quality collaboration and a new culture of collaborative working is becoming critical.
As McKinsey and Company’s report ‘The 21st Century Organisation’ observes, “Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next great performance challenge – and the stakes are high.”
Collaboration-enabling technologies have advanced rapidly, and visual collaboration takes this to a new level. It offers limitless potential for unifying globally dispersed colleagues, experts, partners, suppliers and customers. It enables every organisation to reinvent how, when, where and with whom their employees work face-to-face. In doing so, it makes global sharing and scaling of thinking, knowledge and resources a day-to-day reality.
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Steljes Business Development Manager Rowan Brunger will be presenting on this topic at the Police Strategy Forum in Manchester this week, 18th and 19th September – and this is a key topic in dynamic and fast-paced work environments, like that of the police force. What difference could you make to your workplace if you could make your response times more efficient?
When response time is critical, you look at streamlining every stage of emergency management – from mitigation and readiness to response and recovery. Visual collaboration solutions can help by changing the way you access and work with digital information, so you can make decisions quickly, accelerate response times and achieve better outcomes in critical situations.
And when we’re all under pressure to do more with less, you need to maximise value from your technology, your facilities and your people. Whether it’s optimising the efficiency of your people, enabling people to collaborate and work effectively wherever they are or reducing travel and costs, visual collaboration solutions can help.
With interactive whiteboards and displays you can share information and ideas in a visual and interactive way offering many benefits for police forces:
Swiftly disseminate information or engage in real-time discussion with experts wherever they are located
Make decisions quickly and enhance situational awareness by easily drawing attention to key data and analysing information visually
Allow everyone to work together on the same documents simultaneously, regardless of location, enabling quicker response times in crisis situations
Conduct briefings, meetings and training sessions that engage participants and keep them focused
Monitor dynamic information across multiple displays situated around the room to stay informed of moment-to-moment situational changes
Prepare responders for real-life situations and add versatility to your training environment.
The world of work has changed – and at this event we’ll share how visual collaboration solutions are already helping many emergency response teams to benefit from these new ways of working.
The Police Strategy Forum is aimed at bringing together thought leaders from across the UK to share ideas and look at how to more effectively co-ordinate resources to enhance policing methods, develop ways of working better and deliver a better service to citizens.
Remote working is a big topic in the Twittersphere right now – and all thanks to what we like to call ‘Olympic dread’. As much as we’d all been looking forward to cheering on Team GB – and were left with sore throats after Saturday night’s fantastic medal haul! – those of us who still need to live in or commute around London for the duration of the games have been getting a headache trying to work out the logistics of the huge event – and with an extra one million people descending on London as we speak, this is a task which sometimes feels like an Olympic sport in itself. Amazingly, the gridlock didn’t really materialise and we’ve been left assuming that flexible working really did take off, and employees are happily clocking in from home – or anywhere. And we get to glue our eyes to that medal table – win/win, right?
However, lots of employers (and even employees) are a bit wary of remote working, with several articles suggesting that the main way of convincing your employer that you’re actually doing your work and not just eating cheese out of your fridge (a popular idea, apparently) is face time. Technology has a bit of a way to go in terms of supporting remote users, but it’s getting there – with visual collaboration solutions like Freestorm from SMART Technologies making it possible to hold meetings across the world without commuting, increased flexible working seems like the next step.
If you are trying the brave new world of remote working during the Olympics, here’re some handy tips on working from home. Key themes in this debate seem to be what technology is available/best suited to flexible working and the best ways of utilising the cloud, but with so many people engaging in a remote working experiment for the Olympics, it might be worth keeping an eye on the results. Top tips include setting yourself working hours and making sure you give yourself a break – maybe even catch some of the Games!
And if you still have doubts, we found this neat infographic from Smartfile that suggests employers are keener on the idea than you might think – it’ll be interesting to see what happens in five years…
Here’s hoping that the rush to put support networks in place for remote working during the Olympics leaves a legacy for the future.
At Steljes we’re really proud of where our technology has ended up, from schools and police stations to rugby clubs, RAF training and business! Here are our five favourite case studies – who will be our next success story?
5. Scottish Water
“It has created an inspirational environment, acting as a catalyst for better collaboration as well as a platform for idea generation.”
Scottish Water faces a huge logistical challenge as the sole provider of water services to an area of 30,000 square miles, covering a third of Great Britain.
Driving up performance levels, creating the right inspirational environment and finding efficiencies is critical to Scottish Water’s aims for improving this vital public service – and ensuring value for money for the Scottish public. However, the tools available for its head office teams to plan, collaborate and work together were limited to flipcharts, conventional whiteboards and projectors.
So SMART provided the solution: Scottish Water installed four SMART Board™ units and hubs at its head office in Dunfermline, one in each of its newly-refurbished meeting rooms. With these tools, Scottish Water’s teams can write in digital ink over any application, make notes as they go and instantly capture the flow of ideas. The whole collaborative process is faster, more engaging and more productive as a result; the boards are being put to great use every day by all of the head office departments, including the senior management, finance and IT teams.
Scottish Water’s transformative programme of infrastructure, facilities and IT investment has helped it hit record levels of customer service, water quality and environmental sustainability, whilst keeping bills low.
(Read more about investing in the future with Scottish Water)
4. BT
“Ultimately we’re using this technology to change and transform the culture of the company.”
BT’s motivations are all about being number one for customer service. With teams across the UK, India, China, the USA and Central Europe. BT Innovate and Design (BTID) realised that it needed a new environment where both layout and technology supported agile delivery.
The answer was the adoption of SMART Technologies’ collaborative solution.
It started with a proof of concept at Adastral Park, BT’s centre for development in Ipswich, leading to two hundred people and seventeen SMART Board interactive whiteboards at Adastral Park, one whiteboard each in Belfast and Glasgow and two whiteboards in India.
By using the new SMART collaboration tools, a group of five developers are able to resolve a problem within two days rather than travel to India for five days – improving staff retention and work life balance, as well as reducing travel costs and carbon footprint.
“We estimate that the SMART Boards and the TAP system deliver a saving of tens of thousands of dollars in indirect costs.”
For a company like Tullow Oil, it is critically important to manage the interaction between what is happening below and above the surface – a technically challenging business, and this is where the need for real-time data and technologically advanced tools for data handling and team collaboration comes into play.
Within TAP, their ‘Technology Assisted Production’ system, SMART Boards have a critical role as a key visualisation and collaborative tool giving its engineers and other colleagues not only the ability to view and share data, but also to annotate, manipulate and write on the display, to use touchscreen commands and to instantly save and share the results.
All in all, SMART Technologies is playing a pivotal role helping Tullow Oil to achieve its business-critical goals faster and more accurately. In due course, Tullow Oil is aiming to expand their use of SMART products and replicate this system elsewhere, including Uganda, where its oil exploration project will soon be moving into the production phase, and London.
“We can set up a conference in less than three minutes and SMART’s collaboration technology fits perfectly with our mantras of “walk up and use” and “three touches and go”. It really is that simple.”
O2’s business case is built around realising efficiencies, improving time to market and reducing costs for the business, and the company has multiple offices throughout the UK – as well as headquarters in Slough, where it also has two other offices. With frequent travel between the Slough and Leeds locations, the company realised something had to change, as a great deal of time was wasted simply ‘setting up’.
“We decided to amalgamate the three Slough offices into one location accommodating 2,200 people,” explains Alan Parkin, programme manager, infrastructure design and delivery. With only 47 meeting rooms – half the number previously available – the new Slough site demanded a more productive and collaborative working environment.
We were able to provide that for them. The pilot we set up with them was so successful that almost all of the 47 meeting rooms in the new Slough office will have a SMART Board and the boardroom will have two SMART Podiums.
“Using the new solution from SMART Technologies, we have improved the effectiveness and efficiency of our meetings and write ups.”
Microsoft’s Technology Centre (MTC) in Reading, Berkshire hosts hundreds of customers per year – from start up companies to FTSE 100 companies – to help them understand and improve their business processes.
Meetings could often last up to 3 days with Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelist (DPE) team discussing products that have not been officially released yet, and the use of normal whiteboards meant writing up all of the information from the meeting could take up a day or more.
The productivity and effectiveness of these meetings was improved massively when Microsoft installed a new meeting room solution from SMART Technologies. The system combines SMART Board interactive whiteboards, SMART Meeting Pro Premium software, SMART Bridgit conferencing software, ultra-short-throw projectors and multimedia speakers.
The new meeting room solution from SMART Technologies has enriched the way in which Microsoft and its customers work together; customers have told Microsoft that they feel more actively involved in the meeting and that the interactive whiteboards help to break down any barriers to creating new ideas.
(Read more about enriching customer experience with Microsoft)
Steljes Business Development Manager 
information visually
PRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY 