Making the most of an office move

When organisations are compelled to move to a new office building, CIOs have a once in a career opportunity to give IT a “new lease of life”.

The Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research.

It’s a small window of time for chief information officers to demonstrate their business knowledge, and show off new technologies that drive different ways of working for greater collaboration, productivity and long-term growth. But it also presents a considerable challenge around managing the inevitable resistance to change.

The most crucial advice offered from CIOs that have beat down this path: get involved in the relocation plan as early as possible.

Berys Amor is the director of technology for commercial law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth. Last October the law firm moved more than 400 Sydney staff into a $350 million development on Elizabeth Street, ditching offices in favour of an open plan environment designed to drive greater collaboration. It wasn’t universally popular.

“Initially, it caused a lot of debate,” Amor said. “We had to look closely at things like confidentiality and security. Right up to the weekend we moved there were still a few people unhappy about the prospect of losing their office. We had to do everything we could to help them adjust.”

Amor was involved in planning the move from its inception two years earlier, and said there was a huge change management program that involved many meetings with staff of all levels and detailed consultation with the firm’s partners.

Her team produced volumes of content to give people a feel for how they would operate in the new environment - how a lawyer might take a client call in a public space, for example, but move it to a private setting without losing connectivity.

The deployment of VoIP at the law firm was central to improving communications within a more open and collaborative working environment.

Amor said this meant Corrs would no longer have to maintain separate networks for phones and data and could administer the network from anywhere. It could also reduce costs associated with moving, adding or changing employees. Staff can now be reached on a soft phone, desk phone or mobile using a single number and are able to do videoconferencing from their desktops. 

As always with big ideas and significant changes, the devil is in the detail. Corrs looked at Cisco technologies for parking calls and picking them up in another room but eventually settled on a range of headsets that gave staff the freedom to walk around, undock laptops and switch seamlessly onto the wireless network.

Corrs also installed another wireless network, separated from the local area network, which staff can connect their personal devices to. Since deploying a mobile device management suite, Amor is quite happy for lawyers to receive work email on tablets or smartphones. 

The firm is vendor agnostic in terms of devices. It moved away from supplying BlackBerry devices over a year ago, and while some partners have clung doggedly to theirs, most now carry iPhones or Android handsets from Samsung and HTC.

“Giving people the ability to connect personal devices generates a lot of goodwill,” she said. “Obviously you have to set boundaries but we haven’t had anybody downloading movies yet.”

More lessons from office moves ahead: Meridian Energy and Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research...

Wes Ferguson is head of asset development for the Australian operations of NZ-based renewable energy generator and retailer Meridian Energy. When Meridian moved into a much larger office space in Melbourne last September, providing flexibility was his primary concern.

“Everything we do has to be able to change quickly to meet the growing demands of the business and changes in the market that we operate in,” Ferguson says.

“It’s an interesting challenge because our generation business is very structured and heavily regulated, but the retail business is fast moving and dynamic.”

The diversity in Meridian’s operations is also reflected in the technology needs of employees. Within its online energy retailer, Powershop, there are lots of creative people who need to be Mac-based but are also happy performing some tasks on tablets or smartphones.

In contrast, project teams within the generation business tend to live in a Windows world with spreadsheets and databases. As a result, Meridian has no centralised policy on what devices people use to get their jobs done. It also makes systems and office space available around the clock to reflect modern practices that eschew the traditional working day.

“We are a 24x7 operation and a lot of us work strange hours. Having our systems and office available around the clock is important because we have people working through the night and over the weekend,” he says.

“There’s no whistle to start our day in the morning or stop it again. We have a completely flexible working environment.”

Although it still maintains “an oversized cupboard” housing fibre optic connections, routers, network switches and four servers storing critical data that has to be onsite for regulatory purposes, Meridian has embraced cloud infrastructure wherever possible. This means staff can access all of their desktop resources whether they are sitting in the office, visiting its Mount Mercer wind farm development 30 kilometres south of Ballarat or flying into Germany to negotiate with suppliers.

Cloud also powers Meridian’s heavy use of analytics. Ferguson said its generation business produces massive data sets that power predictive maintenance analysis, while the company’s energy trading business is able to rapidly assess and act on emerging market trends.

Meanwhile over in Perth, Bret Watson has been serving as interim CIO at the WA Institute for Medical Research since 2012. Contracted by Titan ICT Consultants, he produced a business case for the institute to become a facilities provider that managed data storage, server processing and user authentication services.

In doing so, he essentially put forward ambitious plans for the $200 million centre to operate as a community cloud.

Looking back, Watson offers several lessons for those CIOs involved in a greenfields build. Project delays meant contracts had to be split into separate streams for network, telephony, wi-fi and cloud, which created some headaches.

Although data centre and applications would have been split anyway, having one contractor for network and server space with another for the cloud running over the network was cause for tension.

“There have been some interesting issues regarding who owns what, which would have been nice to avoid,” he advised. “Appointing a single systems integrator could potentially have gotten around that.”

Back at Corrs, Amor has all but dismantled the small server room from the firm’s previous Sydney office and moved to an infrastructure-as-a-service model. Corrs still operates a national production data centre in Melbourne, but one of Amor's next major tasks is coming up with a gradual migration path to the cloud.

“We wouldn’t even consider building a data centre in the new Melbourne building [which is expected to go live mid 2015],” she said. “It just makes more sense to move to a purpose-built facility.

“The long-term goal is to be with a cloud provider as our equipment ages [but how soon that happens] depends on the provider we choose and the capability they can offer.”

As with any major project, effective change management is crucial if an organisation is to minimise the disruption associated with an office move and maximise the benefits of its new technology. Amor said her team worked hard to get people excited about the technology, bringing them over for trials ahead of the move and providing advanced training after the event to make sure everybody got the most from their new tools.

There was understandably management concern that everything would “just work”. Amor and the senior project manager prepared a presentation to Sydney partners four weeks out from the move to lay out all areas of risk, what had been done to mitigate it and what could go wrong on day one. 

One thing they hadn’t been able to do was test the local area network under load. Yet, when the move took place, the three biggest teething problems were related to the office blinds, the bins and the temperature, she said.

“We [IT] didn’t even make the top 10, which was a huge relief and a credit to my team,” she says. “They worked so hard to make it a success and have put us in a great position for future office moves [in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane]. There’s certainly a level of confidence now in what we can deliver.”

Ferguson also set about engaging key Meridian stakeholders as soon as he had acquired the site at 357 Collins Street, Melbourne. He met with each business owner to create a steering committee and set them all a deadline to come back with that they needed and wanted in the new location.

“I told them it was important not to constrain themselves because I wanted them to think outside the box,” he said. “Once we had a set of wish lists we started joining up the common dots and accommodating some more specific requirements.”

Once the dust has settled, it’s important to make everybody aware of the biggest successes but also to reflect on things that could have been improved.

In hindsight, Ferguson said he would put more technology into boardrooms to facilitate presentations, while Amor regrets deciding to change telco provider at the same time as the move. Watson wishes he had been involved in the whole process earlier – much, much earlier.