Mobility adds to strain on staff

Mobile technology is going to change the way businesses operate by altering how individual employees work, according to John Johnson, chief information officer at chip giant Intel.

Johnson says mobile technology will have a dramatic impact on the workplace, but warns that employees must not become over-worked just because connectivity is always available.

‘Mobile technology is changing how we operate,’ Johnson told Computing.

‘We see people more and more not working in the office, but working in other places, and typically they are working on global teams. So they are working with people who are not just in a different time zone but in a different location.’

Johnson believes that within global companies this reliance on advanced communications can lead to problems.

‘It is hard from a work/life balance perspective if I am going to have someone in China, someone in the US and someone in London all on the same conference,’ he said.

‘There is no good time to meet under those circumstances; someone is going to have to get up in the middle of the night. That is a dynamic we are going to see a lot more of in business.’

He says another problem induced by increased mobility is the issue of people working far too hard, for too long and not balancing their work life with their home life.

‘When your eight or nine hours a day are being done, but not necessarily in that eight to five time slot, the risk is actually that you work too many hours,’ he said.

‘That is something that I think people, not just inside Intel but generally, need to think about or the risk is of work/life balance being tilted in the wrong direction.’

Butler Group analyst Mark Blowers says firms must come up with methods to help employees deal with work/life issues.

‘They have to have policies in place to protect their workers from over-stressing themselves. People have to be made aware that they are not expected to work all the time,’ he said.

‘With voice communications you get a level of interaction you cannot achieve any other way, but if that means holding meetings outside hours, you have to think carefully about its value,’ he said.

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Further Reading:

• Mobile WiMax to restrict systems
• John Lewis gets its warehouses to talk
• WiFi badges locate doctors in the house
  

Virtualisation

Intel chief information officer John Johnson believes virtualisation technology will be critical in countering the expansion of company data centres.

He believes the technology, which allows servers to run multiple operating systems and hard drives from one machine, will prevent servers from taking up more space and expense for big organisations, which could be using only 15 to 20 per cent of their overall server capacity.

He estimates that globally, Intel could save $350m (£188m) by consolidating its 75,000 servers using virtualisation.