Teleworking: Working from Home.

The morning commute to work is a ritual that is cemented throughout almost every society, yet the trend of telecommuting continues to chip away at that old routine as the way we live and work changes rapidly.

In the UK, U.S. and everywhere in between, technological evolution has allowed a workplace revolution to take place in the form of telecommuting. The workplace of the future has gone beyond the cubicle and corner office. It’s at home, the coffee shop, the beach and anywhere the mobile worker can flip open his or her notebook computer or wireless handheld device.

The crush of cars on freeways and highways has no doubt led to the telecommuting – also called teleworking – trend that has reached more that 12 million employees in the United States that spend more than 8 hours per week working away from the office, according to Gartner Dataquest, a leading information technology research and advisory company in the U.S. The number from Gartner shows a dramatic increase from the year 2000, when just 6 million Americans put in 8 hours a week outside the office.

Meanwhile in the UK, more than 2.1 million Brits work from home and around 8 million more spend at least some of their working week in their homes instead of at the office, according to the Office of National Statistics.

“The growth in employees working outside the office in both the U.S. and UK is substantial,” said Sarah Laycock of Tierlinear, a UK tech company which has developed a business productivity tool ideal for today’s telecommuters called the BT BizBox. “Telecommuting is going to be a fact of life for all businesses; it’s just a matter of time.”

The numbers certainly point in that direction. According to Gartner, 27.5 percent of Americans will be teleworking by 2009. The trend is likely to continue in the UK as well, as more and more employers in both countries are coming on board. A survey from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reported in September 2007 that 46 percent of British firms now offer workers the opportunity of telecommuting, compared to just 11 percent in 2004.

As is the case in the U.S., the stimulus behind the popularity of working outside the office are due to inadequate transportation systems and advances in digital and mobile technology.

“That teleworking has quadrupled in three years is testament to how far and fast firms have come in adopting new technologies for the benefit of staff and the business,” CBI deputy director general John Cridland said in the report.

It’s technologies like Tierlinear’s BT BizBox that has made businesses more comfortable and confident with the idea of telecommuting. The BizBox incorporates several methods of functionality for the small and medium-size business, with secure forms of customer, employee and contact management, as well as quoting, invoicing and scheduling mechanisms. It’s a simple solution that works in sync with the 21st century mobile world.

“BT BizBox is an online web-based application, which can be accessed from anywhere by any Internet enabled device,” said Laycock. “This makes it ideal for the rising number of home/flexible workers as they can access all the centrally stored company information away from the office making them more productive. BT BizBox is also launching new functionality that helps the traveling sales people by providing them with an easy to use route optimization tool.”

The phrase “telecommuting” was coined by Jack Niles, who in 1973 was Director for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Southern California. Niles began his research into telecommuting and teleworking during the early 70s in an area primed for such an event. The Southern California basin, with its notorious traffic congestion, high fuel costs and parking problems, was where telecommuting had the opportunity to really take off.

After a slow start, the rise of personal computer, followed by the Internet and mobile devices has put telecommuting into overdrive. The improvement now in broadband is offering workers new choices in the way they live and work. Tierlinear’s partner, British Telecom, is fostering that mobile environment with advances that have increased bandwidth and other high-speed broadband services throughout Europe.

Telecommuting has its pluses and minus, but at its current state, the advantages are outweighing the disadvantages for both worker and business. Telecommuting provides employee flexibility, allows working parents more freedom, increases employee productivity and allows companies to outsource and hire employees that would otherwise not be available.

One of telecommuting’s major drawbacks is ensuring a secure environment for company data. With a workforce more spread out and less centralized, companies face an increased risk of confidential data being lost or misused. It’s an issue that companies supporting the teleworking world like Tierlinear are well-versed in.

“Security is of utmost concern with BT BizBox,” said Laycock. “All data is securely behind firewalls and is monitored 24 hours per day by security specialists. Software, hardware and human intrusion detection systems and methodologies constantly monitor the systems ensuring no one is accessing the servers that is not supposed to be.”

Along with products like the BT BizBox, a host of other products like webcams and video conferencing software will see a sharp rise over the next decade as companies downsize office space and increase workers’ ability to access remote locations.

With all these tech toys, along with PDAs and email, the teleworker could conceivably be on the clock 24 hours a day. Telecommuting may give the sense that workers can basically do whatever they want if they don’t have the boss looking over their shoulders. But the reality is that workers are going to have to prove that they’re worth their salaries by communicating their value.

“Telecommunicating doesn’t come without its pitfalls for the worker,” said Laycock. “It’s going to be an environment where you have to sell your self-worth a little harder, while setting limits and boundaries to avoid burnout.”

February 24, 2008 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates, CRM, ERP, News, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

How the Internet has changed the way we work

With the advent of the mobile phone, small businesses were liberated. They were no longer required to be tethered to their office / home in order to receive business. Instead they could go about their normal daily activity and take calls everywhere.

This freed up considerable time and expense.

Then came the Internet. It brought with it just as dramatic a change. It allowed consumers to shop around and find the best deal / service - irrespective of location. So somebody in London could find that perfect gift from a small one man business located in the Yorkshire Moors or Lisbon.

Business were now able to compete on a national and international stage. This expanded the market but also brought downs the barriers to entry. I mean if it doesn’t matter where you are located then you can move to the cheapest part of the country / world and operate from there.

This globalisation of the marketplace brought with it additional challenges for small businesses. For a start you had to get your business out there. But where was there?

Search engines were a good place to start but if you didn’t know what you were doing you could spend a fortune on Google Adwords and still not get anywhere.

And when you finally got customers, you had to communicate with them - but how? I mean if you were taking business internationally then you either had to do everything via email or have the phone maned 24/7.

Then in a world where everyone can review / rate anything, you needed a reputation. How do you get that when they never meet you or speak to you?

Over the next couple of months we will be going through a number of these scenarios and helping you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, VoIP and UC, Intranet and Internet. We’ll demystify the Internet and hopefully show you how to get the most out of it.

We hope you enjoy these articles and they prove useful.

If you have any topics that you would like to hear about then let us know - we’re sure we know someone who can demystify just about anything Internet related.

Regards

Karen

December 19, 2007 | Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

The world is flat

“The world is flat” by Thomas Friedman is a book I would thoroughly recommend. (See Wikipedia article on the book for the 5 min version)

It highlights how the world is changing with the advent of technology and the Internet in particular. For example, only a decade or two ago, businesses used to compete locally for work. Today, they compete globally. Furthermore, the barriers to entry in many markets is dropping faster than at any other time. So there are more competitors out there. However, the market has also increased in size. If you don’t have to do business within a 10 mile radius of your base - then the world truly is your oyster.

This is a changing the way businesses need to operate.

Service is critical to maintain customer loyalty as someone somewhere will always offer you it cheaper.

BT BizBox is a software solution that aims to put you back in the driving seat with regards to how you grow your business. We are going to build an application where small businesses get access to the same or similar functionality and information that the big guys have taken for granted for years.

BizBox is all about allowing business owners to:

[1] Manage and communicate with their customers via email, SMS, phone (and whatever else turns up in the future)

[2] Manage their business (eg. what am I doing today, this week, this month, who owes me money, who should I invoice)

[3] Manage all of their information (word docs, docs created by the system including reports, key information that I need to be reminded of in time otherwise I will spend a fortune doing it in a hurry again etc.)

[4] Free up time and help foster a better work life balance (I mean that is the reason we started our own businesses in the first place wasn’t it?)

[5] Create greater levels of customer loyalty through increased levels of service, better customer understanding and greater use of referral & word of mouth marketing.

[6] Steer the direction and development of the application to better serve them as opposed to a generic off the shelf solution which doesn’t take into account their needs and requirements.

We are currently focusing on [1] and [2]. We will be focusing on the remaining 4 in the New Year.

We believe BizBox must minimise the amount of work that you or your business does.

ie.

you should be able enter the information (any information) into the system and the system should remind you (when you want reminding and how you want reminding)

you should be able to see at a glance how much work you have on right now, next week, next year.

you should be able to know who your most valuable customer is and why

you should be communicate with your customers without having to have a PhD in rocket science

Imagine a couple of scenarios if you will.

[1] You have a special offer on. You currently have to send out a mailshot (at considerable expense) or harvest the list of customer email addresses into your mail client and then mailmerge the message with the list which takes time and is a pain.

What if you could just write the text there and then, choose the customers by type from within BizBox and then hit a single button and voila its gone. Not only that but you can then track the response rate of that email being sent out - without any additional work on your behalf.

[2] You want to be able to price services on specific days of they year at a higher rate than other days because you know you will be busy or that the market can withstand it on those days or you want to lower prices on days you know you are relatively free. Wouldn’t it be great to see at a glance how busy you were this time last year or how many quotes you had to send out to turn into a job and therefore an invoice?

Furthermore we believe that if you, the user, has to keep on going into BizBox to extract information then its no better than a spreadsheet for controlling stuff :-) We think we can do better than that!

So imagine being able to tell the software what type of information you wanted to know daily, weekly, monthly etc.. and how you wanted to be contacted (email, SMS etc..) and then walk away knowing that you were going to be alerted to the information how you wanted it when you wanted it.

Thats BizBox 2008.

Regards

Karen

December 8, 2007 | Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Community driven software

Hi,
We stated back in September that we would be looking to produce a number of articles to stimulate the SaaS debate.

We have now completed the first article which focuses on the community driven element of BT BizBox.

Below is a copy of the article, we would be interested in your thoughts.

CRM’s 21st Century Challenges Are Met By BT BizBox

From the UK to the U.S. and all points around the globe, the CEO’s are no longer running the company. It’s the customer who’s now in charge.


The explosive growth of the Internet during the last decade has resulted in options for customers that were at one time unimaginable. As of June 2007, 1.133 billion people use the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, making it, as American philosopher N.J. Slabbert noted, “a basic feature of global civilization.”

As the Web has given customers more power, businesses have turned to Customer Relationship Management, which itself has emerged as a powerful trend. Companies have realized that they have to sell the way customers want to buy, not the other way around. In what has become a buyer-driven economy, customers have finally been able to drive the issue home because technology has given them a much louder voice.

CRM comes in many software packages, but is more than tech gear. It’s a philosophy in dealing with customers that covers a wide spectrum of requirements, from service to employee training to information management. It’s constantly evolving and taking on many forms, one of which is being orchestrated by a new system called BT BizBox, whose aim is to provide simple and effective productivity tools for small and medium-sized businesses.

It is becoming more important to understand your customers and their behavior in order to stay ahead of the competition. Understanding the customer is important for product designing and marketing, so the more information you can store on your customers, the better. If you do not have a suitable CRM for recording all this information, it means you have to employ people to do it for you, which adds additional operational costs to your business.


CRM evolution is still in the early stages, with a bright future that is leaning toward more and more companies incorporating the objectives of a CRM strategy into their business plans. But those business plans are fluid, and always changing. Therefore, CRM needs to be flexible, which is the essence of BT BizBox. Instead of being fully developed before it’s put into organizational use, BT BizBox can be developed by these organizations in real-time, creating a customized solution that can roll with the latest developments of a new generation.


That new generation, as has clearly been demonstrated, is a digital one. The so-called “PlayStation” era is a group that’s comfortable with tech and has been bred on digital. It’s a culture that’s wired with iPod’s and Sidekicks, Blackberry’s and Razrs.


“This group of customers will expect you to conduct business with them in an always on, always connected, real-time way,” wrote Barton Goldenberg, author of CRM Automation. “Always on, always connected is a result of the move from an analog to a digital world, which will be completed around 2030. In the digital world broadband rules, every mobile device has a wireless connection to the Internet, all computing devices are connected to each other, and all computing devices are synchronized and always up to date. In other words, real-time becomes the norm for conducting business. ”


The norm has become solutions that are vertical, where products that are designed can meet the needs of a particular industry. A one-size-fits-all CRM market is headed for extinction. Because the customers of these businesses want their information On Demand, these businesses are demanding more from the abilities of CRM, looking for more management functionality and adaptability.


Like a customized house, Tierlinear has built the foundation, partnering with BT (British Telecommunications), one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. Its web-based system has all of the basic business tools like customer and contact management, timesheets, scheduling and invoicing. Now, BT BizBox is turning to the consumers to influence the finishes touches, with further development of the application being built through feedback from the BT BizBox community. This solution, which is currently in Beta format and free to use, gives small and medium-sized companies a cost-effective way to managing its business needs.


It provides all customers with a business in a box solution, which helps organizations become more efficient and effective. It is developed by the community so there is no predefined product roadmap. Developments and future requirements are driven by the customers.


Furthermore, web-based software like BT BizBox is part of a revolution that’s transforming business. Agile software lets business and consumers have better access when applications sit on distant Web servers and run on standard browsers, eliminating the hassle of installing software or moving data when switching computers.


BT BizBox is a web-based system, so it can be used anywhere in the world. End users can log into the application anywhere they have access to an Internet connection and it is simple to use. Software as a service is growing due to the access of the applications, the ease of use and the low cost.



October 24, 2007 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment