Cloud Computing and Workshifting

Today I’m working from home. Yes, I’m really working, and this post is evidence. I actually write most of my posts at home, where I can more easily think and concentrate with no distractions. Some people can listen to music in the office to tune out distractions, but I am a musician with two degrees in music, so I analyze the scales, harmonies, rhythm, instrumentation, structure, and influence, or just enjoy listening to some of my favorite music, to a point where listening to music is as distracting as any other activity.

According to an excellent report published this week, “Workshifting Benefits: The Bottom Line,” compiled by the Telework Research Network (TRN) and sponsored by Citrix Online, there are many benefits to working at home in addition to optimal productivity for certain tasks. The press release announcing the report states that “virtual work policies could save U.S. businesses over $400 billion per year in increased productivity, lower office costs, and reduced absenteeism and staff turnover.”

Here are the key findings of the report, from the press release:

TRN’s Savings Calculator is based on data that shows 40% of American workers could work from home at least some of the time and of those, 79% would choose to if given the opportunity. If those people worked from home just half of the time:

• A company of 100 people could gain approx. $576,000 per year and the U.S. economy as a whole would gain $235 billion in increased productivity.
• U.S. business would save an additional $124 billion in office costs, $46 billion in reduced absenteeism and $31 billion in reduced employee turnover.
• Each employee could save an average of $362 on gas per year, plus $3,840 on related expenses such as parking, food and clothing.
• Individuals could recoup approx. 2 weeks of free time per year otherwise spent commuting.
• Employee gas savings would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 53 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking over 9.6 million cars off the road – and it would save $23 billion a year in imported oil, which equates to approx. 288 million barrels of oil.
• U.S. taxpayers could save $2 billion in highway maintenance costs.
• As a nation, the U.S. would save $11 billion in traffic accident costs.

Here’s a great post on workshifting.com with graphs of the above statistics from the report.

Enterprise cloud-based systems play perfectly in the above advantages of workshifting. With cloud-based systems, you don’t need to install software on specific machines or be in the office to complete your work. You can do your work from anywhere, to optimize your productivity and to support changes or other requirements you may have.

Consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented quickly and that support our innate desire for flexibility and work-life balance:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

How do you plan to use cloud-based systems to support your modern organization to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud?