Masterclass: Devising a flexible remote working strategy

Flexible working is likely to appeal to lawyers looking for a better work-life balance in what can often be a highly stressful career. With transport costs continuing to rise and delays impacting on profits, businesses can benefit too, but firms first need to give careful consideration to their mobile technology choices.

By Adam Tulk, director of information technology, Russell Jones & Walker

Home and flexible working policies have been around for some time, but in the light of the chancellor’s recently announced increases in fuel duty and the ‘road pricing’ recommendations made by Sir Rod Eddington in his report (commissioned by the Treasury and Department for Transport and published in December 2006), few can escape the conclusion that road transport will get increasingly expensive for businesses and their staff in the foreseeable future. The spotlight will fall on commuters and those that require their staff to work to a rigid timetable in densely congested urban areas.

Furthermore, with many law firms proudly announcing their standing in national surveys that list the best employers to work for, it is clear that a firm’s ability to attract and retain staff of the right calibre will hinge partly upon it being able to offer a modern, flexible approach to working that embraces the modern realities of commuter transport.

The combination of these pressures means it is unsurprising we are witnessing increases in environmentally and socially responsible policies at law firms in an attempt to alter the still prevalent belief, particularly in the larger City practices, that to be successful in the law is to surrender, at least for part of your working life, the delicate equilibrium between a career and a private life.

So should this fuel a commensurate increase in the number of flexible working schemes? Or are these schemes all too often inadequately planned and implemented by employers, who have seized on the belief that they must do something but are not quite sure what can be done that will also be commercially compatible?

There can be little doubt that, planned properly, in concert with an appropriate, well considered and effectively communicated HR policy, home and flexible working solutions constitute a symbiosis that is hard to match in terms of combined employer/employee contentment. As so often with strategies that rely on technology, however, the potential for failure is inextricably linked to the preparation and implementation of solutions, rather than necessarily lying in the technology itself.

Factors of flexibility

So those considering the technological enablement of home and flexible working systems would do well to appreciate that early adopters have travelled the bumpy road to delivery in what could never really be described as a trouble-free option. The process of contemplating the structure of a policy to govern smarter, more flexible working options, may include:

The staff member’s need for more flexible working arrangements;
The employer’s need to retain skilled staff, who might otherwise have to leave because of a change in circumstances;
Furtherance of the employer’s other HR policies (such as equal opportunities);
The degree to which elements of the job can be performed from home;
The attributes and skills of the individual staff member, including in decision-making, time management, self-discipline and communication skills;
The likely ability of the individual to cope with reduced social contact;
The suitability of the home environment in terms of office space and home office arrangements.

Finally, home and flexible working schemes must be conceived as part of a policy that will also demonstrate a return on investment, whether by means of strategic advantage delivered to the law firm or by a more direct cost-saving approach. With flexible working technology, as with many other legal IT ‘solutions’, implementers should resist the attraction of deploying technology only because everyone else seems to be doing it. It is important to look at what the firm itself needs – and what the policies will do to contribute to your objectives, rather than following other law firms’ approaches in the belief that this alone will improve things.

Technology options

Assuming the policy is methodically researched and communicated, what can the technologies available to today’s legal practice offer?

Virtual private networks and presentation servers

Cheaper and faster internet connections have fuelled a massive increase in the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) that connect your office network to remote users over a secure ‘tunnel’ on the internet. Early VPNs were clunky and best reserved for the technically initiated, using a solid – if old fashioned in IT terms – protocol called IPSec, which often required the activation and deactivation of a ‘security policy’ and software on the user’s PC or laptop. In short, this meant additional complexity that users never thanked their IT departments for. However, today’s VPNs often use Secure Socket Layer technology, which is the ‘s’ in https in the web browser and is used every time something is bought online. SSL means you seldom need more than a web address and some security credentials to connect, so your laptop or PC can start talking to your office network securely – just as if you were sitting in the office itself. All the complex routing is taken care of and you seldom need to appreciate things such as the IP address.

Many organisations are now seeing staff want to access their office systems from their own PCs – or from other remote locations when taking a laptop proves impractical. With proper consideration given to securing connections and information, Citrix Presentation Servers and equivalent options allow access to the full suite of office and enterprise systems using the fully featured graphical user interface staff see when sat at their desks in the office. This makes a real difference to both the IT department and the end user because there is no need to deploy bespoke hardware and software to users who may want to work flexibly. Rather there is a discrete environment where users can ‘drop in’ from their own or another PC, without the need to pre-plan.

These technologies will deliver complete access to all the common legal IT applications, including Microsoft line-of-office applications, legal practice-management solutions (PMS) and customer-management solutions (CMS), e-mail (including management and archiving bolt-ons) and digital-dictation systems. In fact, users have access to any application, almost without exception, that runs in the office, as well as direct access to network drives, which means it is possible to access any important documents that are only stored on the secure office network.

Many of the additional benefits will also put a smile on the face of the chief information officer (CIO). Using Citrix, he or she could dramatically reduce the speed of deployment or the ease of maintaining applications by delivering them from a bank of servers (or a Citrix ‘farm’) held in one or two locations. This has its own issues in terms of resilience and redundancy, as well as requiring a well-thought-out, wide-area-network plan, but in IT spheres virtualisation is becoming increasingly common as a way of easing administration burdens and providing rapid application delivery to end users.

Although reliance on Citrix and virtualisation is gaining popularity and enabling firms to reduce the size of their server real estate, these approaches are still seen as retrograde in some quarters. Old school IT professionals will remind implementers that having a large, centralised bank of servers and relatively basic (or ‘dumb’) endpoints, is the hallmark of mainframe computing, the likes of which have not been seen for two decades. The truth is that today’s computing power, backed up by redundant planning, is finally enabling companies to realise the benefits of increased processing power, when for years these increases have only made a very small difference to the way applications are delivered to end users.

Webmail portals and remote e-mail appliances

Few of today’s law firms fail to provide remote access to e-mail, either by means of a webmail portal, Blackberry or equivalent, or both. Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 product line made Outlook Web Access easy – and it has since become the standard for the deployment of basic webmail services, although there are also benefits to be gained by beefing up the security access controls built into the basic offering.

So popular are remote e-mail appliances such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile that it is hardly necessary to describe them in depth, but the general trend is now to start leveraging the mobile device so it can cope with more than just plain e-mail. Interwoven, the structured content-management company that delivers Worksite was, I think, the first to announce integration with the Blackberry device. Windows Mobile appliances can also run a version of the Citrix ICA, so all office applications are available on a single mobile device. It is perhaps not yet something for everyone, but how long will it take for custom user interfaces to be offered on mobile devices to serve other legal IT over the Windows Mobile or Blackberry technologies?

Video conferencing

Video conferencing is the lost gem of the legal technology landscape. Lack of recognition as a genuine business tool is linked to the fact that most lawyers have already come into contact with it over the years – and many have come to dismiss it as expensive, clunky and ineffective. A large number of law firms even possess the hardware to facilitate video conferences, but then fail to use it effectively – if at all. Why has such a powerful technology been dismissed to the dusty video conferencing suite?

First, video is thought to be the domain of the international meeting – more associated with a conversation between Zurich and New York than Sheffield and Bristol offices on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps there is a perception it has slightly glamorous connotations, associated with ‘deal makers’ and ‘important’ meetings – more for the CEO suite than the trainee’s office. But video conferencing can actually bring amazing and tangible savings to certain classes of law firm in a very mundane way, facilitating management decision making, saving countless chargeable hours and shrinking the country for national multi-site practices. Add to this the benefit of delivering the same technology to clients and partner organisations and competitive advantage continues to grow.

Other objections are that video conferencing is expensive, requires costly data calls and results in everyone talking over each other, but the costs and quality have been driven in opposite directions in recent years. Boxes from Tandberg and Polycom are now available for very little capital expenditure – and if properly used to inculcate a video conferencing culture for compatible meetings, return on investment (ROI) is rapid and noticeable. It even leverages the spare bandwidth of existing IP networks or is easily deployed over a managed, hosted network from a supplier like MVision, who claim to bundle the equipment together into a total solution for a price even less than the daily congestion charge!

The user experience has also been consistently improved over the years, using modern codecs (a device or programme capable of performing encoding and decoding of a digital data stream) to cope with delays and bandwidth challenges dynamically. The result is a consistently reliable technology that gets you very close indeed to the experience of being in the same room as your colleagues and clients.

Among other things, video conferencing can help:

Substantially curtail direct and indirect travel costs and mesh compatibly with a travel costs control policy;
Facilitate better internal communications in scenarios when travel is impractical;
Enable speedier internal decision making with the rapid arrangement of video meetings to meet the demands of your business.

It is also worth mentioning that there has been a quiet revolution taking place in the domestic broadband arena. Most people will know that the download speed from the internet is increasing and becoming available to a greater audience by the day, driven by a seemingly insatiable appetite for domestic bandwidth, itself driven by public consumption of applications such as iTunes and web surfing.

Some readers will doubtless have succumbed to invitations to upgrade their broadband speed, whether to 2Mbps, 8Mbps, or in some urban areas up to 24Mbps but how many people actually realise the significance of the increases in speed their network allows them to upload information to the internet? Video conferencing relies on bilateral network communications and domestic DSL and ADSL connections provided inadequate bandwidth to facilitate video conferencing. However, internet service providers are now presenting domestic broadband services with higher upload bandwidths, such as 256Kbps or 384Kbps. Even taking into account contention (you share your bandwidth with other users on the same exchange and this can reduce the real-world communication speeds), it’s now beginning to be possible to use video conferencing over the internet or via a broadband connection that cross-connects into a corporate network.

This expands the possibilities for video conferencing at a very low, capped cost from the home to the office. When wedded to technologies such as VPN or Citrix and perhaps telephony technologies such as those discussed below, quite a full and flexible suite of functionality can be seen in the flexible working environment.

Voice over IP (VoIP)

Next generation networks will soon allow the seamless connection of office technology to end users wherever they are located. It is now perfectly possible for your office extension to follow you to your home or mobile phone without the caller, or even your colleagues, being aware that you are not sitting at your desk and for you to retain the call routing and re-routing functionality that you have when sat at your desk.

These technologies use Internet Protocol, the language used by most of today’s computer systems to communicate. However, due to compression codecs and clever switching, these calls are not very demanding of bandwidth, making them well suited to use over ADSL broadband connections and thus saving significant operational telephony costs.

What this means is that home and flexible workers can now remain connected to office telephony systems when they are not at the office. Therefore, Switchboards can become virtual, with your switchboard operators working from home, opening up significant new opportunities for staff who could not otherwise work in a city centre environment. They can route calls to a fragmented workforce, where the technologies that I have described above serve as the structure to facilitate team working, just as the office environment used to.

With technologies such as Live Communications Server and Communicator, Microsoft is now starting to tell people about the importance of ‘presence’. Borrowing from technology found in MSN and Yahoo’s instant-messaging platforms and probably used more widely by your children, Microsoft will demonstrate to the corporate world what ‘presence’ can do for it commercially. Presence is most obviously about checking your colleagues’ availability in real time. With presence, users can share details about their availability in detail, beyond a simple ‘I am away from my computer’ message. Depending on how policies and parameters are set, users can get very granular, down to the most minute details of how they are spending their hours and minutes.

Microsoft’s vision of presence will include incorporating it into telephony. Many video conferencing vendors and telephony suppliers will already talk to you about integration with Live Communication Server, but Microsoft also has grander ideas. They want to integrate many of their applications so that more complex workflow can be complemented by information about users’ availability. Imagine, for example, knowing that a user is sat at his desk and available for an impromptu video conference, seconds after you conceive that such a meeting would be helpful. About to place a call to this person, the caller could then be dissuaded from interrupting by information from his VoIP phone reporting that the other person is already engaged in a video call. Similarly, somebody reading an article online could see that the author is actually available for a chat.

Like it or not, Microsoft is facilitating the sharing of information. Even if we take a rather more old fashioned view of the word ‘presence’ – that one is actually present – software vendors will still try to convince us that being always-on, always connected, is good for productivity. In the end, like so many technologies and policies, it is down to the consumer to determine whether they aid productivity for the firm, or simply pull staff even further towards the information overload precipice.

Adam Tulk is director of information technology at Russell Jones & Walker. He can be contacted at a.s.tulk@rjw.co.uk