Organizations with ‘Bleeding Edge’ IT staffs experiencing the most branch growth

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 2/13/07

Companies that have embraced the concept of a “virtual workplace” tend to have self-proclaimed bleeding edge or aggressive IT cultures. This underscores the tight link between a successful IT strategy and a flourishing virtual workplace.

In Nemertes’ upcoming Building a Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark, we asked participants to describe their IT culture by selecting one of four types: bleeding edge, aggressive, moderate, and conservative. What we found was a bipolar distribution, with nearly equal percentages defining themselves as conservative and bleeding edge, and the majority selecting the two middle selections - aggressive (41%) and moderate (33%).

As I mentioned last week, branch offices are growing at a healthier pace than they did between 2005 and 2006, increasing from 8.9% to 11% from 2006 to 2007. But that 11% is truly average. As I drilled further into the data, I found that growth in the number of branch offices can be significantly greater among some organizations.

Those who defined their IT cultures as bleeding edge tend to have the smallest number of branch locations, 93 on average. But they have the largest percentage of growth in their branch offices, at 51%, and the largest percentage of virtual workers, at about 37%.

These results tell us that bleeding edge organizations often can be smaller in size, with an aggressive plan to leverage technology. For example, why would a start-up necessarily need numerous locations when it could locate employees in home offices - investing in IT and saving much more in real-estate costs? We see these companies increasing the size of both branch offices and the number of virtual workers.

In other cases, the bleeding edge IT organization is overseeing a massive global enterprise. (The highest annual revenue in this group is $266 billion). This type of company may still be behind the curve in terms of actual number of branches because it’s operating very large branch sites. Moving forward, though, they plan to add more small branch locations.

These correlations illustrate a few key lessons: Enterprises and small businesses with plans to increase the number of branch locations should examine their IT departments carefully. A huge success driver in a virtual workplace is the ability to leverage new technologies quickly so that workers are highly productive and the company stays a few steps ahead of the competition. Vendors and carriers trying to sell to these types of companies need to understand the need for quick turnaround time on pilots and orders and extreme responsiveness.

Next week, I’ll review what’s happening at organizations that define their IT culture as “aggressive.” Until then, let me know what’s happening at your organization by writing to robin@nemertes.com.