Quocirca's Straight Talking: Just how distributed is your business?

Demand on corporate networks for distributed services these days goes well beyond the usual IT tasks. But actually measuring how distributed a business is can be problematic. Bob Tarzey discusses a tool that could help.

Most networks deliver a range of services - voice, video and IM, for example - as well as traditional IT applications. A business's dependence on its network is linked to how distributed its working practices have become.

But to get an objective measure of how distributed a business is can be tricky and requires looking at branch networks, remote-mobile enablement and external interaction.

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To this end Quocirca has designed a distributed business index (DBI) that encapsulates all three types of working.

The DBI has a minimum of one - for a business with the single premises and no external or mobile workers - to a maximum of 30 for a business that has many buildings and lots of external and mobile workers.

In general terms, financial services organisations turn out to be the most distributed and public sector ones the least. But generalisations can be misleading.

While one German regional government body had a DBI of two, another one from the UK scored 30. The lowest score for a bank, 11, was also from Germany.

The index allows the trials and tribulations of distributed working to be compared. Businesses enable remote working because they expect it to improve efficiency, increase customer and employee satisfaction and keep down costs. But there is, of course, a downside if it all goes wrong when the network fails for some reason.

The impact this has on highly distributed businesses is palpable. All businesses care about the experience their users receive when working at their PCs.

But those with a high DBI are far more concerned about the experience of remote workers than those with a low score. And for those with the highest DBI, network downtime has much more impact on external and mobile workers than it does on office-bound ones.

Most businesses still operate with a single HQ and branch offices but today the quality of communications between different buildings, however widely distributed, is expected to be good for video and web conferencing, centralised content management and emails with huge attachments. The need for enriched communications extends to those workers who spend some or all their time outside the office.

Again, businesses have always had field service engineers, sales people and truck drivers who work remotely, but today many of these workers are linked to business processes through mobile devices.

These demands on external access have also led to a big increase in remote working by employees who, in the past, would have spent nearly all their time in the office.

Home-working provides flexibility to those with families and also lets employees communicate with each other and customers around the clock.

In other cases it is home working that enables staff to work in the first place - for example, agents of virtual call centres permanently based at home. But if an employee can link into a business process from outside the office, so too can customers, suppliers and partners.

This is the fastest growing driver of distributed working - outsourcing of tasks. Some of this is traditional outsourcing. For example, a mid-market company can use an external IT management company to work from afar or give external accountants access to internal records.

But in the past decade more customers and suppliers have been encouraged to do some of their own leg work. This ranges from individuals managing banks accounts online and tracking the progress of goods ordered online, to whole groups of businesses sharing centralised supply-chain management systems.

The degree to which businesses are distributed varies from one industry to another. Retailers have the most branches - on the whole most goods are still bought from shops and there are some very large retailers.

Utility companies have the most mobile workers - lots of field service engineers rushing round reporting faults - and finance organisations have the most external workers - all those inter-company financial transactions.

The worry is that the most highly distributed businesses are, in some cases, struggling to support their distributed workforce. They are pushing the boundaries of distributed working and sometimes failing to meet their own expectations.

Yet these businesses will be the ones to reap the benefits first if they can overcome some of their problems, which are often - at least in part - down to an overworked data network.

There is plenty that can be done: better broadband connections for small branches and home workers, more efficient use of network connections through use of network acceleration products and services, keeping employees focused on their work by limiting their activities and access to content.

Getting these things right and making sure the underlying platform - the network - can perform, will allow distributed working to be pushed to new limits.

Quocirca's report, The Distributed Business Index is free to silicon.com readers.

A leading user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the big picture, Quocirca is made up of a team of experts in technology and its business implications. The team includes Clive Longbottom, Bob Tarzey, Rob Bamforth, Dennis Szubert, Louella Fernandes and Fran Howarth. Their series of columns for silicon.com seeks to demystify the latest jargon and business thinking. For a full summary of the consultancy's activities, see www.quocirca.com.