Episode 034: Working in a Mobile World

Thanks for joining us today. My name is Kevin Ledgister, your host, and today we’re going to be talking about how companies or how an organization can prepare for a mobile workforce. In light of the recent events that have been going on, a lot of companies have had to make the transition from employees being in the office to employees working outside of the office. That comes with a lot of technical challenges, that comes with some challenges in terms of business policies and how that works. For a lot of organizations, they’ve been caught flat footed with that. Today, I have with me Tom Hansel, who is our Director of Customer Care at ImageSoft. Welcome, Tom.

For those of you who are listening, we recently, because of the COVID-19, everything that’s been going on. We’ve had to go through the self-quarantine just like everybody else. Because of that, we had to transition from having all the employees in the office to our employees working remotely.

Tom, I’m just going to start off with you because I know that this didn’t just happened yesterday or last week, that this has been a longer process. Maybe you can just share with our listeners in terms of, what is it that you did? How did you set this up? How did you plan to prepare us for a mobile workplace even long before we even knew that there would be anything like what we’re experiencing today?

There are challenges and different challenges to both sides. We had to tackle them both tangentially to make this work. From the political side, it’s a matter of getting managers comfortable with the idea of not having the ability to watch their employees and monitor them while they’re in their desks doing their work. They have to have some level of metrics and capabilities to make sure that their employees are still being productive and get them beyond the mindset of if you’re not in the office, you’re not working.

It’s really no longer a 9 to 5 world. We need to give our employees the ability to work when they have the time to work. A lot of times we’ll have employees that would like to catch up on work on a weeknight or over the weekend or something, and we wouldn’t want our policies or our technology to stand in the way of giving them the ability to do that.

Then the other side of it is the technical side. Do we have the security in place, the systems in place, the systems accessible to our employees? Do our employees have things they need to be successful? Meaning the hardware, maybe additional monitors or laptops as opposed to desktops? And do they have a place where they can work efficiently? Do they have a quiet, remote place in their house where they don’t have distractions from the dog or kids or anything else like that, where they can stay heads down and work?

We had to tackle both of those a long time ago. This isn’t something that as we find ourselves in a position where we need this, we can’t start the process. We had to start this process years ago to get ourselves in a position to where we were ready to work fully remotely in a situation like we find ourselves in now.

It’s a process we started a long time ago. It evolved over time to, we would allow some employees occasionally to work remotely if they had a need to. Such as, if they had a handyman coming to the house or they had to sign for a package delivery, for whatever reason they needed to work from home. That allowed them to get their feet wet into the idea of working remotely. It also allowed our IT team to understand where are our hang-ups and what problems do we have that we need to work through to make them successful working remotely?

We tackled both of those. There were a lot of hiccups along the way, and as we come across those, we worked through them and eventually we got ourselves to the spot that we’re in now.

In our particular field, and our products and customers supported across the nation, we had to invest very heavily years ago. Luckily, it’s coming to fruition now about finding the talent no matter where it’s at. Employees that we have in California, we have in Michigan, we have in Florida, we have from coast to coast basically, more and more talent. We recognize the right people, the right fits. We needed a system that can adapt to that particular requirement.

As we were moving through in this adapting process, we had to make systems universally available and universally compatible. The idea being that someone working from Florida can have the same consistency as someone working from Washington. There are too many variables available too there. We always adopted a remote first policy. The idea that all systems can be accessed at all times on all devices. Very lofty goal, and there’s been obviously some ebbs and flows, changes in technology, changes in platforms and of course business processes change over such a protracted period. But by adopting those core tenants when reviewing systems has allowed us to basically been almost bullet proof when a disastrous event, like what’s occurred over the past month, it allowed us to just go without a single hitch. Because we practiced that in the scenario that something could happen like this or a building, force majeure events, or even, you know what? We have a new employee that’s working from Saskatchewan type of thing.

By having our platforms and our mindset on that, we’ve been able to adapt both from a workforce perspective, finding the right people, as well as massive disasters, problems or idiosyncrasies.

I love that comment that you made, Bill, about the fact that when you’re looking at new technologies, you have to look at it as a mobile first type of approach as opposed to mobile last. Because if it’s mobile last, then you’re probably going to end up with this technology that maybe works great if you’re in the office or a desktop, but if you’re on a mobile phone, it’s probably going to be a lackluster experience or it’s not going to work at all.

One of the big questions that comes up with this in terms of you don’t have somebody… A supervisor looking over somebody’s shoulder, they’re working from home, we have to have a high level of trust, but you still have data governance, you still have security that’s a big concern. How have you guys maybe addressed some of those concerns so that employees can work securely with that information and you know that systems are being protected and we’re not having somebody that isn’t… Somebody from some Island somewhere is logging into the system and trying to access what we’re doing? Maybe just give an idea to some of the things that the businesses can do to help protect that data.

You have to ensure that all of your data when it’s in motion, when it’s at rest, is always, always encrypted. Most of the time, anytime someone sees encrypted data it’s not even looked at it, it’s impossible to crack basically. The heat depth of the universe actually get through. By protecting the channels of communication, not in a dedicated, secure fashion, things like your legacy VPN type of technology, those kinds of wrapped encryption around an unencrypted stream, you’re still vulnerable from an insight attack. From employees sniffing, stealing data, everything to that effect. But then you also move into the other aspect outside of VPNs, certificate and authentication.

I’m getting a little technical on this side, but it’s very difficult to break down. But the idea is that having everything over the line on the public internet encrypted so your workers can be productive without having to worry about technological overhead.

Those are always massive concerns. When you talk about compliance, luckily there has been a huge push from all of the major players in the market. Anywhere from Google to Amazon to Microsoft with Azure, they’ve invested billions of dollars with regards to data compliance. They want their platform to be the forefront and we’ve been able to leverage that investment to make sure that we’re covered from our side, GPDR, any of the amounts of NIST compliance, all of that data, all of the rules and regulations that are wrapped around them, we were able to leverage some of the machine learning to identify things like, here’s a credit card number in a public document. We should probably take that out.

There is a massive, massive amount of tool sets for those willing to learn and want to apply best practices. That’s what we invested in years ago and it’s paid off in spades today.

Then it goes beyond that. There are solutions out there such as mobile device management that would allow an IT department to remotely manage an employee’s device. If it was, say stolen or lost, the IT department could still have some level of control over destroying that data before it gets to the wrong hands.

That’s critically, critically important. You guys also mentioned machine intelligence was actually interesting as well too. About how that plays a part in terms of being able to identify different information inside of the stream and being able to hide that or remove that or protect against that. How has cloud technologies played into your strategies in terms of making this all work?

We’re seeing over the next couple of years, more and more that creep into every day technologies that we use even in our homes. Two years ago, who would have ever guessed that there would have been a constantly live microphone in over 80% of the homes in America waiting for you to ask to play music? It’s a rapidly, rapidly evolving field that’s just barely touching with regards to financial records, security, small business security and the recommendations that come along with that.

Do you guys have any experiences in that perspective in terms of how some of the OnBase applications are enabling our staff to work remotely and keep that information flowing?

You can pull back any data that you would be able to pull back from a desktop application, the Unity client, for anybody who’s familiar with OnBase. It is a little bit more limiting on the, you don’t have the full functionality suite available to you, but typically when users are on the go, like I said, standing in line of Starbucks, they don’t need the full functionality, they just need the quick access or a quick reference to a particular piece of information. That’s what you get and more with OnBase, from the mobile standpoint.

It’s that kind of technology that really allows people to be mobile and flexible and in a sense, socially distance but still very much engage personally, in terms of what’s going on with the office. Is there anything else that you guys can think of that really has made a big difference? Maybe there’s something down the pipeline that you guys are thinking of in terms of, is there anything else that the organizations can be thinking of that might help them to take that step, or take that leap board, or what’s next gen that you guys are hearing about in the CIO Magazines or the different worlds that are out there that are talking about what’s going to be available for businesses to take them to the next level?

If I say that you can only have an iPhone, unfortunately half the staff has droid phones, back and forth. Or I want a Macintosh or I want a MacBook Air, or anything in that effect to do my work. Being able to empower employees to choose the platforms they’re most comfortable with while still providing the same service is an absolute huge, huge step. Users are able to deal with the problems that they have from a business level, not from a technology level. Really creates IT to be engaged as a business process partner versus the department of no as they’re typically known in a lot of companies.

I can just say, over the years, it’s been a huge, huge, huge transformation just in terms of the effectiveness of someone being able to work remotely. I think that those two principles in terms of being mobile first, platform agnostic and being highly secure cloud first, those types of things are all based principles that really leads you to a successful type of approach where employees can work remotely.

Before we close off, guys, this has been a great conversation. Is there anything else that you want to share with us or any other thoughts that are on your mind? Just open up the floor to anything you might think of.

There are a lot of KPIs and other types of metrics out there that managers can use to feel comfortable knowing that the work is still getting done even when the employees aren’t there. Our conversation focused a lot on the technical side of it, but there is the political side of it as well. That’s something that if you don’t bring that side up along with the technical side, you’re going to have a very tough time to get this initiative off the ground.

Overall, the idea of being with allowing people to work from anywhere, you can ultimately minimize your business overhead in the end. You’re looking at thousands of thousands a month. The average median and high metroplexes like Los Angeles or New York, you’re looking at upwards of $80 for a square foot. Having dedicated space for an individual that could be remotes or even flex with things like hot-desking or anything in that effect has huge financial repercussions over time.

Overall you’re able to minimize your footprint for things like headquarters or for collaboration spaces by just massive, massive amounts. Right now we have, I believe 13 fully remote folks. Add those numbers up, multiply with whichever locale you want and you’re looking at thousands upon thousands of dollars that you’re saving. That really helps justify when someone’s looking at a T-chart of debits and credits that remote-first does have the potential to have great investments and then great return on that investment over time.

Gentlemen, I just want to thank you guys both so much for joining us today. I think this was a really great discussion just in terms of the thought process, the technology and the benefits in terms of just preparing in your organization to be able to work in a mobile world. Not only so that it can help you the next time we run into something like COVID-19 or a snow storm or some natural catastrophe, but it’s also a way forward for organizations as well.

I really think, I really agree with both of their points that it really is a future. The younger generations that are coming up, they are used to technology being an extension of their bodies. It’s like their third hand or their second brain or whatever it is, and being able to work that into how we work and how we solve challenges for our customers and serve our customers is going to be a great deal. Thank you guys for joining us and hopefully that we can get you guys on another podcast soon.