Smart Work Centers: will they work?

Smart Work Centers: will they work?

September last, Cisco’s Connected Urban Development (CUD) program featured the launch of its next pilot: the Smart Work Centers around Amsterdam. Different types of ‘satellite office’ initiatives have seen the light of day around the world before – and have died or had meager success. So what sets Smart Work Centers apart from comparable initiatives in the past and what is innovative about them?

Smart Work Centers as piloted under CUD around Amsterdam have been defined as facilities close to residential areas that allow knowledge workers to operate close to their homes, in addition to the home environment to work from. The Smart Work Center brings together a number of services that help to optimize a day in the life of a worker – not only services that help to facilitate and optimize work processes (good connectivity, high-end work stations, telepresence) but also a wider range of services that helps to optimize other aspects of people’s lives, such a child day care facilities, financial services and high quality catering. Amsterdam, in partnership with Cisco and working with numerous third parties (public sector and private entities alike) is now initiating a network of such Smart Work Centers.

Although remote work centers in various shapes and formulas have been tried out before, Smart Work Centers may prove successful under current conditions at this particular time, in this particular setup. To commence with the conditions: there is a convergence of larger trends that help render the Smart Work Centers offer a realistic solution to the public sector, to the private sector and to people. Climate change, rising energy prices and ever-increasing traffic congestion around larger cities around the world are among the obvious arguments. Such challenges are not new to cities but the alignment and perceived or experienced impact of them have provided a unique sense of urgency. But other ‘mega-trends’ are at work as well. Furthermore, they are in tune with the changing nature of work itself. Work, especially knowledge work, has become more distributed, more collaborative and more result driven. Where work gets done matters less then ever, whereas technology has made leaps in providing sound alternatives to physical exchanges, collaboration and commutes. New broadband infrastructures allow for high end symmetric connectivity and innovative soft and hardware allows us to utilize these bandwidths.

The above trends have helped enhance the most important trend of all – the one that concerns culture and psychology and entails the readiness to adopt a culture of ‘distributed work’. This holds true for employers that increasingly underscore the need and the wins of adopting a culture of distributed work, inclusive of the solutions as well as incentives that help to facilitate such a culture. It holds true to workers that strive for a better work-life balance, more independent working styles and wish to be hold accountable for the results they produce rather than anything else. It holds true for the community at large as distributed work solutions, the Smart Work Centers included, help to address various political and public sector issues, such as climate change, mobility, energy efficiency, ‘aging well’ -- and extending the working lives of the graying segments of society -- as well as socio-economic development issues. Last, it holds true for all in terms of a dawning awareness among various stakeholders that ‘access’ is becoming more important than ‘mobility’ – access to work, access to data and services, access to the city at large.

The set up of, and the approach towards, the Smart Work Centers is equally important in understanding what may drive their success. First, the recognition of the above mega-trends resulted in the Smart Work Centers being a program that addresses a wider work eco-system as opposed to Smart Work Centers being a project that concerned solely the forging of facilities with cubicles, coffee and connectivity. Governance, culture and incentives have been on the top of the agenda from the outset. Second, Smart Work Centers address mobility and traffic congestion by defining it as an additional measure to public transport or working from home, certainly not as a measure that will substitute either of them. Third, Smart Work Centers address new demands that come with new ways of working requiring high bandwidth, flexible work schedules and a convergence of work and private life in time and space. Fourth, Smart Work Centers function as true community centers to neighborhoods, allowing for social cohesion and social services. An additional function may be found in applying Smart Work Centers as a measure of inclusion for aging professionals and residents, allowing for more life-long learning facilities and continued inclusion in processes of work at flexible hours and at a decreased need to travel. Last, Smart Work Centers have been forged and fitted as to put the worker at the center, helping to ‘optimize a day in the life of a worker,’ as opposed to focusing on the facilities themselves as something remote and ‘satellite’ to the physical HQ.

In order to comprehend what the Amsterdam blueprint is made up of, what makes it innovative and what explains the early success of the Amsterdam Smart Work Centers so far, the concept is explained in more detail below. The CUD Smart Work Centers meet several criteria which are not typically covered by early satellite office initiatives or traditional multi-tenant business centers:

·         SWCs are located close to residential quarters and main traffic arteries. SWCs are being scaled as a fine-mazed network of many small centers as opposed to a small number of large outfits;

·         SWCs carry a business model that is based on work stations rather than square meters or square feet. This allows for a far more effective and efficient use of space and energy per worker as the space taken up by e-work stations is not designated to one single tenant but are taken up on a day by day heteregenous basis;

·         New SWCs sites and interior outfits can and must be constructed and procured based on high standards insofar energy efficiency and sustainability is concerned;

·         SWCs require communication technology that further enables the knowledge worker to orchestrate his or her work in a truly distributed fashion, collaborate and have virtual meetings that equal the physical meeting experience. Telepresence is part of the SWC set up and allows for such virtual meetings. The multiple tenant set up of the SWC has allowed for a viable business model for acquiring and operating telepresence;

·         SWCs, in the pilot set up, require affordable high-end symmetric bandwidth in order to host telepresence type of facilities and allow for high end connectivity to multiple tenants;

·         SWCs need to be recognized and utilized as an instrument in policies, incentive packages and ‘cocktail solutions’ defined by employers, governments and municipalities in addressing congestion and mobility agendas;

·         SWCs – and SWC networks in particular – require advanced reservation systems for the use of employers and individual users. Eventually, reservations are to be allowed over multiple platforms to include PC, mobile phone, phone and car navigation services;

·         SWC use requires cultural and psychological change for many. Under the SWC pilot, programs have been initiated by participating employers, encouraging the use of SWCs to their workers.

What has driven the SWC to become truly innovative is not one single aspect. It is not just technology or the multiple tenant set-up. What has driven the launch of the pilot SWC and the scaling efforts currently under way around Amsterdam has been a process of ensuring the above over a longer period of time. In more detail, it required

·         A long term governance set up that included active public and private sector stakeholders involvement from the outset (15 months of preparation preceded the launch of the actual pilot in the Amsterdam case);

·         The involvement of a ‘disruptive’ service provider proving symmetric connectivity over fiber to the premise networks and dedicated telepresence lines at a pricing level ensuring a viable business model to the SWC, as well as a positive ‘push’ with regard to the interoperability of telepresence facilities over different networks;

·         Close collaboration with larger employers in order to kick-start a viable SWC business model and forge employee focused programs and measures to encourage SWC usage and induce work place culture change where and when relevant;

·         Public sector stakeholders to assume project responsibility and the promotion of the SWC solution as part of a wider community vision on mobility, energy efficiency and accessibility;

·         Awareness among all stakeholders that SWCs concern a solution that Help organize work in a distributed fashion as opposed to physically centralizing it. Workers require access to their work as opposed to just maintaining a degree of physical mobility required to execute a commute;

·         Awareness among all stakeholders – the cities and employers in particular – that a comprehensive implementation of a ‘Connected and Sustainable Work Eco-sphere’ allows for reductions in traditional office space and traditional work stations, radically reducing costs and energy on a per worker, per year basis.

What has been missing so far in the Smart Work Center program under CUD is a degree on quantification. Can we calculate how many commutes will be substituted? How much energy will be saved? What will the increase in worker efficiency be? How many ‘old offices’ can be shut down as we chart this course further? Under the CUD partnership, research and models are being developed to help point the way, with early calculation models currently being shared among CUD partners and made public. More work will have to go into this aspect of the program in order to allow for solid arguments and business cases for decision-makers to work with. However, the comprehensive approach defined, sought and undertaken in the case of the Amsterdam Smart Work Centers by all stakeholders involved has been unprecedented. Failures and successes that the program has produced and is likely to produce will allow for benchmarks to be utilized by cities around the world for several years to come. What can be hoped for and counted on is for different cities as well as private entities to adopt these lessons with high degrees of success – to be founded on the innovations that preceded them. For this the Cities of Amsterdam and Almere, partners in the SWC pilot, as well as other key stakeholders involved, command respect and deserve congratulations.

Bas Boorsma

Head Connected Urban Development (Amsterdam), Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco

The Connected Urban Development (CUD) program was initiated two years ago as a public-private partnership with several cities around the world and formulated as a commitment under the Clinton Global Initiative to develop innovative and ICT centric solutions, proofs-of-concept and pilots that will help pave the way towards a more connected and sustainable blueprint of urban living, working, learning and playing. The program has produced several PoCs, projects and pilots so far, in different stages of development, to include the Connected Bus, the Eco-map, Smart Road Pricing, the Personal Travel Assistant and the Smart Work Centers.