PRINT.IT
27
valid for companies in the
process of downsizing.
“These principles have
helped us maximise our use
of real estate with tangible
savings and helped us reduce
our printing by 34%, and we
weren’t big printers in the first
place,” he said. “We have also
massively improved our working
efficiency because we have
enabled collaboration through
the design of the office.”
NewField IT bases its Future
of Work concept on three
foundations:
1. Fully integrated IT
systems.
The better the IT infrastructure,
the better a company’s
use of information and the
less need there is to print.
The key ingredient here is
interoperability: if a business
is to streamline processes and
make use of its data, all systems
have to talk to each other.
One of the impressive
features of the NewField IT
offices are the large format
displays that provide each team
with insights into relevant data.
“In the Future of Work,
predictive and prescriptive
insights will be commonplace,
not just the preserve of a data
analyst doing a monthly report.
Each team has a live analytics
screen that’s updated with
regular cadences, as often
as every 15 minutes, so they
can see exactly how they are
performing during their working
day,” explained Duckenfield.
2. Good paper/Bad paper
The workplace of the future will
not be paperless – paper is still
good at certain things – but
when and how paper is used
will change significantly.
According to Duckenfield,
there are four reasons why
people print – to read, to
annotate/sign, to save and
to share – but as technology
develops what is perceived as
an acceptable use of paper will
change.
“There will be good paper
and bad paper,” he said. “Good
uses include reading – there
will be circumstances where
reading on paper is still better
than reading on a computer,
but technology will catch up;
annotation – until electronic
annotation tools catch up with
the speed and convenience
of paper, then paper will still
be a good way of doing it and
there will be circumstances
when paper forms are better
than a tablet especially in
developing markets; and
sharing information – you will
not be able to hand out a free
newspaper electronically or a
leaflet advertising a restaurant.
“However, some reasons
will become less good, for
example signing. Most Western
territories now accept electronic
signatures and there’s no need
for it within a company – it just
slows things down. Sharing
information should be done
much more effectively and
saving information on paper is
definitely bad. At NewField IT,
we have moved entirely away
from printing and filing because
if information is on paper it can
only exist where the paper is. We
have got rid of our filing cabinets
and we have also got rid of our
off-site archive. Everything is
electronic, it’s all backed up in
multiple locations.”
3. Zoned office space
The third element is the more
efficient use of office space
through zoning. NewField IT
breaks the office down into four
distinct zones:
Specialist space.
Every
business has certain facilities
that can only be located in an
office, such as a print room,
mail room, clean room or, in the
case of NewField IT, a systems
integration lab where software
development teams assess
hardware products, brainstorm
and do other tasks that can’t
be done remotely.
Collaboration space.
To
better serve the needs of users,
businesses should provide
a variety of meeting rooms,
preferably combined with an
online and walk-up booking
system integrated with Outlook.
“Rather than waste a load
of real estate with big meeting
space used by few people,
we have tiered ours. We have
single-man meeting rooms
where you can collaborate with
someone externally; we’ve got
three-man meeting rooms;
we have a conference room
with telepresence; we have a
standard meeting room; and we
are about to open a room with
a touchscreen table running
Asset DB, CompleteView and
other electronic assets we
use to help customers make
decisions. It will have no other
furniture and is bookable for
30-minute slots.”
Open plan office space.
NewField IT recommends
a mixture of fixed desks for
people who have to come
into the office every day and
hot desking, with a clear
desk policy and and no paper
filing. Paper is still printed by
NewField IT employees, but
it must be thrown away or
scanned into the company’s
cloud-based DocuShare
document management system
when finished with. Any paper
left on a desk at the end of the
day is placed in a communal
sin bin, from where it can be
retrieved if necessary.
Social space.
The fourth
zone is shared space, such as
a kitchen or break-out area.
Duckenfield argues that this
style of office will become
increasingly common and that
as technology advances and
organisations’ use of data
improves their need to print will
decline.
“(This approach) is already
happening a lot in the
enterprise. As with MPS when
it came out, enterprises have
been the first to embrace it, as
the bigger the organisation, the
greater the benefits. We are
already engaged with quite a
few large corporates and multi-
nationals that want to move in
this direction. It is going to take
time for this to percolate down
to the SME and SMB level, but
it will happen,” he said.
Such has been the success
of its Future of Work strategy
that NewField has already
changed the way it operates,
and it is now encouraging its
clients to do the same.
“For our end user customers
it’s not just savings around
print,” explained Duckenfield.
“It’s savings around time and
space, making them go faster
as a business, helping them be
more compliant, helping reduce
their back office overheads.”
NewField IT’s conference room with telepresence system for global collaboration
Soft seating in the NewField IT reception area
