Overview

A growing number of organizations are dealing with a growing number of virtual workers. What does it mean to operate in a virtual workplace? It means employees working in multiple locations, away from their supervisors or their workgroups at least some of the time. Basically, virtual workers do not have a single place where they conduct all of their business. The number of employees who work from home (either full or part time) has risen to 17% in this year's benchmark, up from 10% last year. And only 8.5% work in headquarters, on average.

These figures are creating new challenges for both business and IT staffs, to make sure the right network infrastructure, collaborative applications, and emerging technologies are in place to make virtual workers as productive as possible.

Nemertes' latest groundbreaking benchmark, "Building a Successful Virtual Workplace," examines several key areas: WAN and branch-office infrastructure, convergence deployments, collaboration and unified-communications best practices, and mobility strategies. Nemertes will detail the findings, based on discussions with 120 IT executives, in this detailed research in nine volumes, in addition to upcoming vertical-market studies.

Volume 1: "Branch Office Best Practices" presents and analyzes the latest trends and best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of branch offices and the employees in them.

Volume 2: "Collaboration Business Case" presents and analyzes the latest key trends and best practices for usage of collaboration tools and technologies. The interest level in collaborative technologies is on the rise, but organizations continue to struggle with the actual cost and benefits of various types of collaborative applications. The productivity benefits are clear with most of these applications. Nemertes shows how you turn that productivity into dollars and cents.

Volume 3: "Mobility for Your Business," illustrates that the secret to a successful mobile enterprise is the development of a mobility strategy based on simplicity. Enterprises with successful mobility strategies often implement some of several key practices, including adoption of mobile email, implementation of industry-specific applications, and most importantly, mobility-enabling the sales force. In this volume, we present our findings from our in-depth interviews with IT executives in domestic U.S. and global enterprises regarding their plans and experiences in deploying applications to the new mobile workforce. We identify best practices in common use across many industries, and make specific recommendations for maximizing the benefit of mobility throughout your enterprise.

Volume 4: "VOIP Review: Products, Services, Architecture," presents and analyzes the latest trends, vendor ratings, and best practices for Voice Over IP. You will find the following information on VOIP:

* State of Deployment: How are organizations deploying the technology? What stage are they in?
* Architecture: What are the most common architectures organizations use to leverage VOIP and why?
* Organizational Best Practices: Who is making the decisions and how should companies organize to best manage the project?
* Vendor Ratings & Summary Analysis: Who's on top? Who's not, and what are the drivers?
* Management Best Practices: What tools do companies use to manage VOIP, and what are the latest trends with managed service providers?

Volume 5: "Real-Time Collaboration Tools" discusses adoption and use of applications such as instant messaging, web conferencing, audio and video conferencing, presence, and real-time communications dashboards. It explores opportunities and trends for integration of business processes and communications services and the use of IP in the contact center.

Volume 6: "Deploying Mobility" is the second of three volumes focusing on mobility in the enterprise. In it, we discuss best practices for implementing a mobile strategy. This includes detail how to craft a mobility framework that captures an organization’s current and desired states, and provides concrete steps for closing the gap. We discuss key elements that must be considered, including the appropriate organizational structure, user issues, device challenges, infrastructure requirements, services, tools and support. And we discuss how those elements need to be modified based on an organization’s specific goals.

Volume 7: "Business Case & Organizational Strategies" presents and analyzes the latest trends and best practices, and provides figures on the business case for VOIP. This volume covers:

• VOIP decision-making: Who's making the decisions, and how is that structure changing?
  
• Organizational structure: How should IT leaders organize their teams for the most effective and successful project?
  
• VOIP business case: What are companies spending on their VOIP implementations and ongoing operational costs? Where do they save money, and where do they spend it?
  

Volume 8: "Collaboration Applications" presents and analyzes the latest key trends and best practices for usage of asynchronous (non-real-time) collaboration tools and technologies including shared workspaces, e-mail, blogs and wikis. “Collaboration Applications also looks at the opportunities for open-source communications and collaboration tools in the enterprise environment. This volume covers:

• Usage and adoption trends, vendor attitudes and enterprise requirements.
  
• The role of collaboration tools in the enterprise.
  
• Enterprise views and Nemertes’ analysis of open-source opportunities in the collaboration and communications market.
  

Nemertes Clients:

Non-clients: Contact for information on accessing this benchmark.