Technology has for years been sold as a great leveller. People with the right implementation would be able to position their small business against the giants without any difficulty and people in branch offices would be able to work as efficiently as if they were sitting next to colleagues at head offices.

Unfortunately for many, the truth is often more frustrating. Research from interconnectivity specialist Citrix points to widespread disaffection with the very technology that was supposed to make working from a location other than the centre of an organisation an absolute pleasure.

The survey, conducted for Citrix by Vanson Bourne, confirms that two thirds of employees feel as though they are 'second class citizens' because of, rather than in spite of, the technology that should be empowering them. There were specifics rather than general moans: 56pc of respondents felt that their applications ran more slowly than they ought to, while 42pc believed their IT problems took longer to solve than they would at a corporate HQ. Some 30pc said applications simply failed to work. Once a system had failed, only 30pc of branch employees said they had technical support on site compared to 70pc of head office staff.

One Midlands-based manager of a branch office expressed the disaffection felt by many. He preferred to remain anonymous as he felt complaining would damage relations with his employer.

He said: "My branch office is in a serviced building with an onsite internet provider, but our HQ in London handles everything else, including access to files, folders and servers, so we have two IT providers to deal with on a daily basis. Too often there is disconnect between the two, so when a problem arises, no one knows where the fault lies."

Even when there is no overt problem the disconnect remains an issue, he added. "It's highly frustrating not to be able to access important resources when you're trying to run a business. We're then left in a never-ending queue, waiting for our London IT team to help. Ultimately I think we're left at the bottom of the pile simply because we can't speak to our IT team face to face." Even when the system is 'working' it doesn't look useful to everyone. "Waiting for applications to load is part of our daily grind. We seem to spend an eternity staring at an hourglass icon."

The underlying problem often arises when a head office simply extends its own systems to its further reaches. Mike Bailey, UK country manager for network specialist Ipanema Technology, explained: "Branch offices generally access IT resources over the network and that can mean they aren't getting great service due to problems caused by traffic having to travel a long way or being designed for a more localised network type. The result can be a loss in productivity as workers in satellite offices find that applications are running slowly or in some cases data may even be lost.

"So rather than being able to process a customer order in a few minutes, they might find that it takes more than half an hour or some information is not included. Effectively it's like people who live in remote areas being told it is acceptable for them to get their post far later than everyone else, or simply not receive some letters at all."

If technology can be part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Building, civil engineering and support services contractor the Kier Group was one organisation that had issues with building its computers individually every time it needed a new one as they were not based on standard systems. This meant, inevitably, that a mobile IT team had to go physically to each location and install systems from a CD, which in a dusty environment like a portable office on a building site often became damaged.

A move to a centralised system from the Altiris business unit of security software specialist Symantec meant that everything could be installed and, where necessary, upgraded centrally. "We had a 99pc coverage success rate out of 28 offices, which ranged from our head office to a portable building with a sole operator," said Mark Crane, desktop technology leader at Kier. "This roll-out was carried out company by company over two months, and with very little disruption to staff."

A bigger issue can be when the problem is cultural rather than technical. Karen Dyke, Managing Director at retail communications specialist Retail Manager Solutions Ltd. (previously Triangle), is all too aware of the issues."The retail industry is the largest example of a distributed business, made up of head office functions and premises, linking to hundreds if not thousands of remote outlets." She said.

"This diverse distributed environment often has limited understanding or control of what is happening in the stores: product merchandising, staff scheduling, promotions, health and safety reporting - all activities critical to the running of a profitable operation."

The result is that head office has to get in touch to ask what's going on and does this through technology. But this can prove unpopular. "Input and direction from head office functions is seen as checking up - being bombarded with instructions, information, feedback, online forms, forms and more forms, all of which has little to do with selling to the customers."

Alyson Pellowe, managing consultant for HR and development specialist People Vision, has seen numerous implementations of IT and the difficulties with them. "A common problem people working in remote offices experience is that they tend to get information second hand - technology should be an enabler but it needs to be implemented appropriately," she said "I've heard horror stories of people in branch offices being told about company restructures over email or even worse being sacked over email."

Timing is also a key issue. "New technology is often implemented at head office first and then rolled out to branch offices at a later date. This means employees working in branch offices can often find they are using an older version of the technology than those employees in head office," she said, "not only can this cause problems with compatibility but it can also aggravate any feelings branch office staff have that they are less of a priority than those working at head office."

The solution, she believes is in communication. "Communication is key: branch office staff can often feel that they are not consulted on what technology they need or why a new technology is being introduced, which can cause feelings of frustration and resentment. In order to avoid this, management needs to take a WIIFT (what's in it for them?) approach, clearly communicating the benefits of any new technology before it is rolled out."

Nigel Hawthorn, of networking specialist Bluecoat Systems, believes some of the difficulty is due to misunderstandings of the systems themselves. "It shouldn't surprise me, but still does, how many large software installations are only tested at remote offices at the last moment, after the application has been defined," he said.

"And then the IT department works out that something performing with sub-second response times in HQ is unusable in the remote offices due to latency, complexity of the application and inefficient protocols."

Bizarrely, the difficulty can be that the information is only travelling at the speed of light. "This may sound like nonsense, however the inefficient protocols we use may mean that thousands of round-trips are required from the server to the user to transfer one file and each of these trips can mean that data has to travel hundreds of thousands of miles to get to you."

These remain important issues. Branch offices underpin the structure of many substantial organisations - a recent figure from research specialist Gartner said that 60pc of all office data resides in remote offices - but according to the Citrix research, senior managers continue to undervalue these outlying premises.

There are undoubtedly technological tweaks that can help, and the faster a network, the more it will feel as though someone is part of an organisation. The cultural issues that underpin some problems are more intractable, however, and have more to do with people and understanding what the branches are doing than the technology they use to do it.

The Daily Telegraph

Thursday, January 10, 2008

www.telegraph.co.uk