ICT Solutions • Summer 2014

Number 10 I summer 2014

ICT Solutions ICT advice for managers

The New Way of Working A smart mix of technologies, HR and office environment

Belgacom Engage Pack Your office in a backpack

Your website always in the air The secret of good hosting

Thiry/PrimaMundo case New way of communicating, with customers too

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The New Way of Working: More than just technology Visit our new ICT information platform: www.ictnews.be provides information for everyone interested in ICT and technological developments, and makes the link between ICT and the business world.

The theme of this edition of ICT Solutions is the ‘New Way of Working’.

It just so happens that we work differently today than say 10 or 15 years ago. We are more mobile and accessible more or less everywhere.

While we used to go to the office, we now take our office everywhere with us. Work is where our laptop is, where we open up our tablet or where our smartphone rings.

This trend isn’t completely new. We’ve been talking about it for some time. But there is one fundamental difference. Where it used to be mainly about technology, these days the focus is on the company and the end-user. Today we know that the new way of working is a question of approach, rather than throwing technology at it.

In this issue we concentrate on that approach. It is based on 3 main elements – HR (the people), facilities (the office environment) and IT (the technology). You can develop a balanced approach, based on these three, in which it is stimulating for your employees to engage.

With a total approach like this, you can create a policy for the whole company. By including the facilities and ICT, you can build a modern work environment, at the office as well as on the road.

Remote working can be appropriate for many types of jobs and in many circumstances. It can be both useful and motivating for you and your employees. We, ourselves, have implemented this approach at Belgacom and are already reaping the first benefits. So we are pleased to help you with our experience; in fact we are going to do so in this issue of ICT Solutions. Happy reading!

Bart Van Den Meersche Executive Vice-President Enterprise Business Unit Belgacom

In this edition: 3 Edito

9 Case: Flex: Belgacom has opted resolutely for the ‘New Way of Working’ and applies it in three areas: the workplace, technology and people.

of mobile devices and the appropriate necessary applications and support, employees can take their work tools everywhere with them, like a backpack.

13 Solution: Five crucial technologies

16 Digitip: Your website always in the ether

3 Dossier: The New Way of Working, in seven words The ‘New Way of Working’ impacts your office environment as well as your personnel policy and the technology you use. What do you need to take into account as a company and an employer?

14 Infographic: The New Way of Working in figures

6 Case Thiry/PrimaMundo: New way of communicating, with customers too

15 Solution: Belgacom Engage Pack Thanks to Belgacom Engage Pack, consisting

For questions concerning specific IT solutions you can always contact our account managers or our network of ICT Experts (www.belgacom-ict-expert.be).

18 Digitip : New extensions for domain names 19 Tested: New smartphones 19 Book: The New Digital Age

A publication of Belgacom Group | Number 10, summer 2014 | Publisher Belgacom nv, a public limited company, Boulevard Albert II 27, 1030 Bruxelles | Contact: Charline Briot charline.briot@belgacom.be I Concept and production: Minoc Media Services bvba, Parklaan 22 b10, 2300 Turnhout | www.minoc.be

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dossier

The New Way of Working Any time, any place, anywhere. That was the slogan of a well-known Martini ad a few years back.

It is also the motto for our present way of working. The ‘New Way of Working’ impacts your office environment as well as your personnel policy and the technology you use. What do you need to take into account as a company and an employer? The New Way of Working, in seven keywords.

I

ndependent of time, place and space, that is the basic concept behind the ‘New Way of Working’ that has blown across from the Netherlands. It is one of the key drivers of the work environment and office design.

1

Flexible

If there is one characteristic with which we associate our way of working today, it is flexibility. In principle we can work anywhere these days: at home, at the office, at a customer’s place or on the way to one of these three destinations. Wireless technology, be it 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi, in combination with wireless devices, such as smartphones, laptops and tablets, has made this possible.

Flexibility is apparent in the work environment too, if only because employees have increasingly said farewell to their

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fixed offices. Figures in the trade journal Smart Business Strategies show that, at the moment, 29% of office workers in Belgium have to do without a fixed work-

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“In principle today we can work anywhere these days: at home, at the office, at a custo­mer’s or on the move.”

station. In the IT sector and the financial industry, in particular, the ‘flex desk’ is already very much part of the scenery.

Much less so, for the time being, in industry and government bodies.

Belgacom has likewise introduced a more flexible way of working for about 7,000 employees at its headquarters.

To be more specific, this means that, here too, a lot of employees no longer have a fixed desk, so that more space is available, for example, for meeting rooms and informal meeting areas. This way of working allows the telecoms company to cut costs and make better use of its office space. Thirteen floors of the building have already been redesigned. The plan is to convert the whole headquarters by 2015.

The new flexible division of work is an efficiency drive in saving office space. In a traditional office environment, about half of the offices are used on an average day. Employees have their own locker in which they can store personal items and then take them to an available office.

This kind of contemporary office environment uses the number of square metres more efficiently. Where, say, a hundred people used to use as many work stations, the same number of employees now only need about 60 to 70 flexible work places. There are still a lot of unused work stations. At Vodafone, which has implemented a new flexible office concept in the Netherlands and will roll it out in Belgium, too, shortly, this has resulted in a 47% reduction in office space, for example.

But reducing square metres does not in itself guarantee happiness. There must be space and comfort too. There used to be a strong emphasis on cost reduction and cutting back the square metres but, these days, companies realise that a pleasant

dossier

in seven words and spacious work environment makes people more efficient and more productive too.

2

Meeting place

Ten years ago, people still had to go to the office to work. Now they can work anywhere. Today about half of employees occasionally work from home. Figures from Smart Business show that 48% of office workers are permitted to work from home at times. This is sometimes referred to as activity-based working: you work in the most suitable place (and manner) for a particular activity. For example, you can prepare a presentation at home in peace and quiet, while you meet with colleagues at the office.

At Belgacom, too, the possibility of allowing staff to work from home has been introduced. “Obviously that is not possible for all jobs, but where it is to some extent possible we offer the opportunity”, says Michel Georgis, Executive Vice-President Human Resources at Belgacom. According to him, the employees have embraced the increased flexibility and see it as a certain form of freedom. And it’s better for the company as well; it stimulates people to work more productively and more efficiently.

In reality, these days, three out of ten employees at Belgacom work at home, on average, three days per month. Other studies also show that home working as part of the New Way of Working is rather sporadic. One out of four people work at home on a weekly or daily basis, according to recent estimates by InSites Consulting.

Nonetheless, the concept that the office is only one aspect of the workplace has gained in stature. More and more people,

these days, work at home or on the move. This means that the office is increasingly becoming a place where people come to meet each other rather than a place where they come to work.

Smart collaboration is also something the headquarters of Microsoft in Belgium (in Zaventem) and in the Netherlands (at Schiphol) are geared up for. There the whole of the first floor is designed as an open space with ‘hot desks’ where anyone can work. Offices are becoming more open but, at the same time, large open spaces are increasingly being avoided.

In 2014 offices must, above all, facilitate meetings. Open-plan offices in innovative office buildings obviously appeal to the imagination and can promote communication and transparency. But it should be noted that open-plan offices can disturb employees’ concentration. They are distracted, for example, by the background noise or overhear confidential conversations. So, as a manager or employer, make sure there are enough separate areas that employees can use, to ensure there is still a sense of privacy.

An emerging trend in office design that

also fits the concept of the New Way of Working is modular seating systems.

Adaptable seating and meeting elements can be used for a variety of purposes. Waiting and lounge areas can be converted into modular meeting rooms or work areas in no time. Depending on the agenda of the meeting, a heightadjustable table can be made high or low. After all, not all meetings can be kept fast and short.

3

Business culture

A suitable business culture is crucial to the New Way of Working. Partly because he floated his company – Facebook – on the stock market, Marc Zuckerberg has billions of dollars.

Nonetheless, the man just sits amongst his employees in an open office.

Facebook is a good example. The design of your offices should mirror the work culture. If you have a flat organisation structure, you, as a manager, can follow Facebook’s example and just sit in an open office space. If the organisation has more layers, that is often reflected in office design: they are built up hierarchically, >>

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case

Case PrimaMundo/Thiry Efficient processes and satisfied customers? At Thiry those are not just empty concepts. This fruit and vegetable supplier has made a big effort to achieve them. Not only do its hauliers receive tablets for better communication, its customers do too. A nice example of how NWOW (the New Way Of Working) does not have to be limited to a company’s own employees.

Thiry supplies fresh vegetables and fruit daily to supermarkets, grocers, specialised shops and market stalls throughout the country. That is not so simple, explains manager Johan Huys.

“Our sector is different from the others.

In 90% of sectors, a company only starts production after the sale has been finalised. In our case it is exactly the opposite. We produce something which we must then manage to sell.

And preferably as fast as possible, because our products have a limited shelf life.”

Customers often used to place their orders by fax or phone. Then they had to be entered into the system, which resulted in the necessary delay and increased the risk of error enormously.

To remedy that Thiry took a drastic decision. In the future they would provide all their customers with a

mobile device, on which a module for placing orders with Thiry was already installed. “With these tablets our customers can place their orders online, consult delivery slips whenever they wish and monitor their sales statistics in real time”, says Huys.

But doesn’t that create problems if the devices are lost or stolen? For that Thiry uses Belgacom’s Mobile Device Management solution. Huys: “With MDM we can manage all the SIM cards very efficiently and centrally from the cloud. If one customer leaves us or a new one arrives we can immediately deactivate or activate the SIM cards internally. If a tablet is stolen from one of our customers we can empty the tablet in one go with a swap. We feel confident about cyber security with Mobile Device Management.”

Both parties save time

Thiry: “Better service and reduced costs, thanks to Belgacom”

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The customers enjoy other benefits, as well, thanks to this application for iPad and Android tablets, Huys explains: “With the application they can ask for our daily prices in real time, check our stocks and the space available in our trucks. For us, too, this modern means of communication is a plus, because it has considerably reduced the number of calls from our customers. Thanks to these mobile innovations we have been able to cut our costs by at least 8 or 9% and, at the same time, we can serve our customers better.”

Optimal truck use This has optimised communication with the truck drivers too. Thiry decided to equip the 33 trucks with a ‘track & trace’ system and to enable direct communication between the truck, the garage and the distribution centre.

“We can brief our drivers via their mobile devices. They know immediately how much they must load and where they have to go. They can start their work days better prepared now. We also know exactly how fast our trucks have driven, how often and how hard they have braked, etc. As a result, our fuel consumption has dropped spectacularly. But it goes much further than that. A driver can notify us, the distribution centre and the garage immediately if there is a problem with the truck, so the mechanics are ready when he drives back into our centre”, Huys concludes, beaming.

NWOW Thiry illustrates nicely how the New Ways of Working (NWOW for short) not only depend on the latest mobile technology, but also on entrepreneurs’ creativity and innovative thinking. By providing customers with their own mobile devices as well, Thiry has not only made its own logistic processes more efficient, it has increased customer satisfaction too. And, at the same time, its employees enjoy the benefits of the new technology and improved processes.

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>> with boardrooms. In addition, a lot of companies, like Belgacom, adapt their HR policy and remuneration system to the New Way of Working. At Belgacom an employee can choose for technological alternatives in his/her remuneration package, such as a smartphone or Internet access. Or he/she can consciously opt for green mobility instead of a company car.

Also ’Management by results’, where the employee is evaluated on his results and not on his presence, is a primary aspect of the New Way of Working. Company branding, i.e. working on a company brand with which employees can identify, is likewise a principle that influences the

“At Belgacom about three out of ten employees actually work at home; an average of three days per month now.”

way the work environment is designed.

In this case, the physical workplace is a particularly inviting place for people who fit the company. That is so at Alken Maes in Belgium, for example. When the new headquarters in Mechelen was designed the brewer deliberately opted for transparency, as a reflection of the open business culture. It’s even in the terminology. There the work and meeting places are called cockpits and lounges. You can fetch drinks from the ‘pit stops’, as they’re known. Besides that, there are places to sit in the coffee corner, and ‘copy corners’ have replaced a host of individual printers.

4

Virtual

These days, offices are virtual.

They have to be. People are becoming more mobile and companies more international. Distance in time and space is compensated for by all sorts of applications like email, shared agendas, social networks and videoconferencing. Employees use technological aids that make online cooperation possible.

Nonetheless, the degree to which they are used varies a lot, depending on the

professional context. But, in particular, a shared agenda, remote email and a search engine for internal documents appear to be crucial for office workers.

Videoconferencing and social networking are a lot less embedded in the business world. One out of three employees uses presence management, to see whether his or her colleagues are available or to indicate their own status. The most important applications involve access to information. But some people have very high expectations of video and web conferencing, not least of all the actual producers. Videoconferencing is becoming feasible and affordable for more and more companies, big or and small.

If we can believe the research bureau Gartner, videoconferencing now replaces around 2 million airplane seats a year. In fact a lot of video meetings replace travel.

So, contemporary office environments should be designed to facilitate this New Way of Working together. IT companies, in particular, have shown themselves to be pioneers in this. Some of them have reduced face-to-face meetings by tens of percentage points in recent years by using audio and videoconferencing. >>

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dossier

>> Eventually, then, it looks as if video will, to a large extent, replace or supplement the classic meeting. According to network specialist Cisco, which has researched this, around 90% of worldwide Internet traffic will consist of video in 2014. In recent years particularly, video has increased its share enormously. This explosion is due to a large extent to the rise of mobile devices, such as smartphones, netbooks and tablets. According to the research bureau Forrester, about one third of a company’s network is devoted to video data these days, and that percentage will only increase.

When it comes to virtual working though, we should not forget the phenomenon of cloud computing, whereby infrastructure and applications are offered remotely over a network. Universal connectivity is essential here, even at the office. About 7 out of 10 office environments in Belgium are (partly) equipped with wireless Internet access, according to a study by Smart Business Strategies. In the future, to organise cheap, efficient and good quality workstations, it may, in fact, be commercially attractive to use cloud solutions.

5

Ergonomic

Employees’ well-being is another core principle in the design of new offices. The challenge is to ensure that the work environment does not add to employees’ stress, but helps them to feel better and healthier. Ergonomics is not new, although certain elements, such as height-adjustable desks and docking stations for laptops, are considered more often now.

Ergonomics requires special attention if you work on the move. Research by Fellowes, which supplies office products, shows that some employees will work almost anywhere. The places most often used for ad hoc work are, for example, the kitchen table (29%) or bed (21%). But ‘nomadic’ workers often work in nonoffice related environments such as trains and hotels (each 12%), buses (4%), cafés

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“A work environment should help people to feel better and healthier”

(2 %) and even on the ground (3%).

A lot of young employees are connected from early in the morning till late at night.

In the United Kingdom there is already a

term for this: coffice. In other words, we’ll work anywhere where we can go online and there is coffee.

All of this has consequences, because adopting a healthy work posture is often difficult for nomadic workers. “Frequent use of laptops means we can choose our workplace and our work posture, but many people are unaware of the possible consequences”, argues Johan Molenbroek, Associate Professor Applied Ergonomics at the Dutch Technical University in Delft. “Sitting in the wrong position for too long and too often frequently leads to physical complaints”, he says. According to him, time and concentration and, in particular, adequate awareness of the correct work posture, possibly combined with the right ergonomic aids, are especially important now. >>

case

The New Way of Working works!

Belgacom has opted resolutely for the ‘New Way of Working’. It matches the new expectations of both customers and employees and is completely in line with the ‘fit for growth’ strategy. Young people are used to digital life and have no reservations about using technology; older employees want more flexibility and more quality time, and they want control of where, when and how they work.

At the same time, the New Way of Working offers an answer to social challenges like our congested road network and the aging population.

We can summarize Belgacom’s vision of work organisation in the slogan ‘flexibility works’. We apply it in three areas: the workplace, technology and people.

Workplace flexibility means you work at the place and the time where you can best carry out your activity. Having ongoing access to information and sharing knowledge when you need it is essential to this and applies to everyone, whether you are a technician working in the street or a shop assistant. To foster cooperation between its employees, Belgacom is going to equip the floors at our headquarters with flexible workstations by 2015. Shared workstations, meeting rooms, informal meeting areas, and so on ensure optimum cooperation with your colleagues when you are at the office. Remote working, home working or working in a satellite telephone office is done on a voluntary basis and with clear, previously defined criteria. Employees can work at home or in another Belgacom office maximum 2 days per week. Remote working is done not at particular times but when your activity requires it, and where you can do a particular task most efficiently. This is always agreed with the team leader and with complete transparency towards colleagues. Belgacom actively promotes more aware travel and discourages using cars. It provides cycle bonuses and reimburses public transport; managers who give up their fixed parking spaces can use their mobility budgets to finance alternatives, such as season tickets for public transport, or an XXIMO card for occasional parking in public car parks.

As far as people management is concerned, alternative working can only be successful if we adopt another type of culture and management style, too. This is based on mutual trust, autonomy and responsibility. By making clear agreements about the objectives to be achieved, an employee gets more freedom and responsibility to decide him/herself how those goals can best be reached. The team leader’s role in this is mainly to be a coach. They, themselves, are being coached in their new role by a ‘team leader

solution centre’, which helps them to implement the new management approach and bring about this new culture.

Working at flexible places and times and with teams that are becoming increasingly virtual, means that there is also a growing need to make information and knowledge highly accessible. Employing the right technology is very important.

At Belgacom this means using laptops, offering an interesting telecom package and using an internal enterprise social platform (based on SharePoint 2013) where all employees can work together, share information, develop networks and organise data safely and efficiently. Belgacom is also investing in videoconferencing and instant messaging (Lync) to facilitate remote communication. Finally, all employees can hold online meetings and video chats/conferences on their smartphones and tablets.

Very promising results There is still a long way to go to the New Way of Working, but the pilot phase has already shown some very promising results. Nowadays, 3 out of 10 Belgacom employees occasionally work from home, about 3 days a month on average. This year we shall consume an estimated 40% less fuel, a reduction of 320 tonnes of CO2 emissions. According to 70% of the team leaders, home working has also led to an increase in productivity. Moreover, 93% of home workers say that they notice a positive effect on their work-life balance, with 34% experiencing less stress. The office space in the headquarters is 25% better used as well.

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dossier

>>

6

Digital

Working independently of time and place also has an impact on the document world. Take appropriate printers, for example, the trend towards mobile printing or the printer manufacturers that offer organisations broad-based applications for document management. In the future, it will be impossible to imagine offices without scanning facilities too. Scanners used to be used mainly for archiving, at the end of a workflow, let’s say. Nowadays, scanning comes at the beginning of a business process. In the meantime, digitalisation of analogue paper information is fast and easy, done at the touch of a button.

It’s not only scanning that has undergone a revival in recent years, the paperless office– a term that’s been used for nearly half a century now in the business world – has reinvented itself too.

A Dutch study that two software com-

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panies, DDi Document Software and ANVA, carried out at the end of last year, involving three hundred bank and insurance branches, shows that a good 87% of them expect nearly all documents to be sent and received digitally within five years. Another 10% expect the majority of documents to be digitized within five to ten years. Even if we take this study with a pinch of salt, more and more projects involving digital document management are appearing and applications geared to this have been around for a long time.

7

Work-life balance

In the next ten years around 40 million Europeans will retire, while only 25 million young people will enter the employment market. The war for talent will become more intense. A suitable, inviting work environment makes you a more attractive employer and helps you attract

and keep talented employees. In terms of well-being, too, a good work-life balance is crucial. To a certain extent, employees should be able to choose and decide where and when they work. Nevertheless, good, up-front agreements are crucial, concerning the use of the electronic agenda, for example, and employees’ availability. In any case, a good work-life balance is vitally important. A company can help with this. Several studies, including the one by Microsoft in 2011 involving technological staff in the United States, show that the quality of the work environment is the most important motivation for employees, after their salary, for going to work. A high salary alone is no longer enough to please scarce talent. “There is a sea change taking place”, signals Annemieke Garskamp from Steelcase, a specialist in office design. “For many people work is part of their lifestyle. Their office is their home base.”

A lot of offices are responding to this in a creative way. They use leisure elements, play with bright colours and invoke a particular atmosphere. But there is still a lot to be done. A Belgian study by InSites Consulting shows that only 28% of employees consider their offices to be a stimulating work environment in terms of design and decoration.

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Six golden rules

New Way of Working = a new management style?

The ‘New Way of Working’ (NWOW) requires an appropriate management style.

We offer some useful tips and some points to remember.

1. Trust people

2. Clear objectives

4. Adapt your HR policy

This is, perhaps, the most important piece of advice: without trust there can be no NWOW. As a manager and business leader you have to accept that you will not always see your people at the office. That does not mean that there is no transparency. On the contrary, there is – in communication, evaluation and monitoring.

You don’t evaluate your staff on presence but on results, in terms of expectations and objectives that have been clearly defined in advance.

These objectives (also called KPIs or Key Performance Indicators) should preferably satisfy a few criteria. The acronym SMART is very often used to indicate setting and monitoring objectives simply and unambiguously:  Specific: is the goal unambiguous?  M easurable: under what conditions (measurable or observable) can the target be deemed to have been reached?  Acceptable: is this acceptable to the target group and/or management?  Realistic: is the target achievable?  Time limited: by when must the target be achieved?

All these agreements, and possibly others, such as work hours and remuneration, should be set out in your employment regulations. Then your employees know officially what the rules of the game are. Security and fiscal aspects should be dealt with in the regulations too. This makes the NWOW official. A lot of companies neglect the formal regulations, often unintentionally.

3. Make clear agreements

“Without mutual trust there can be no New Way of Working.”

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Agreements go further than pure KPIs. It is advisable to make good agreements with your employees about even everyday work. Stipulate that appointments must be meticulously entered in the electronic agenda, and that other people must be able to consult the agenda as well.

Other agreements are recommended too.

At Belgacom, for example, employees must be constantly available by phone, email or instant messaging for at least five hours on the days they work at home.

5. Adapt your office environment People no longer go to the office to work, but to meet each other, to discuss projects and/or to make appointments.

It is best that your office environment is adapted accordingly. Do people still need individual offices, for example? And if not, is it still possible to have peace and quiet to be able to work properly?

6. Give people the resources That is another proviso. People must have the resources for mobile working and to be able to consult their business applications securely from home or on the road. Cloud and mobile applications are the main tools for this.

solution

Five crucial technologies for the New Way of Working Unified Communications Unified communications (UC) is a collection of technologies, the purpose of which is to integrate all the communication channels smoothly into an organisation, from phone to email, chat and video.

These days, companies are organised increasingly virtually and, more often than not, work is done on the move. At a time when companies have to work together more, with both internal and external partners, and productivity is paramount, efficient communication is not an unnecessary luxury. UC is often a good answer to this. A whole range of manufacturers offer UC although, in general, we can distinguish two groups: on the one hand, you have IT players like Microsoft and Cisco and, on the other, there are the traditional telecom providers like Siemens or Alcatel.

Videoconferencing Besides telephony, Instant Messaging and Presence, videoconferencing is also part of UC. Polycom and Cisco (formerly Tandberg) provide this service, for example. Videoconferencing is mainly about virtual meetings and collaboration.

Telepresence, sometimes called immersive telepresence, is at the forefront. Another form of videoconferencing, known as ‘team systems’, is aimed at facilitating meetings from a meeting room between different subsidiaries and teams inside or outside an organisation. Finally, there are also systems intended for individual use, using LCD screens, for example.

a WAN, or wide area network, for data connections.

What’s more, IP telephony makes extra services possible, such as integration with applications. Helpdesk employees automatically get to see a file on the caller, for example, while big companies integrate the company directory with the IP exchange. Then, employees can look up their colleagues quickly and phone them with just one click.

Central management We produce more and more documents, due to the wide choice of devices (desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones), easy access to software and the freedom to work anywhere thanks to the cloud. This increasing production requires a more carefully considered way of storing files. Good central document storage is less important to the system management that makes the backups than it is to the teams that want to keep an overview of all the documents concerning a particular project. So it is not surprising that correct document management is one of the major investments that companies are

making at the moment.

BYOD A key element of the New Way of Working is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), whereby employees use their own (mobile) devices for and at work.

This has an impact on the choice of mobile devices. Here Microsoft, with the Surface- and the Windows Phone, seems to be engaged in a battle with Google, with its Android tablets and telephones, although the battle is mainly being fought by the companies that make the actual hardware. The third player in this market is Apple which, to put it mildly, is not doing badly with its iPhone and iPad. We have also noticed a definite shift from BYOD to CYOD (Choose Your Own Device). Companies prefer to choose a consumer device that can be used by all their employees. It was not for nothing that Microsoft (finally) brought out the Office package for iOS and Android last year. In view of this trend, purely business devices, like BlackBerry, look less interesting.

Find more information about these solutions also on www.belgacom.be/ict

VoIP Companies that use VoIP now have opted for greater flexibility. After all, an IP phone can be hung anywhere in the network and works immediately. Any user can log in on any phone. Calls to his or her number are put through to the device. VoIP can also reduce phone costs between the various branches of a company if it has

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infographic

The New Way of Working in figures Home working

Trust

49% of Belgians want to work at home 1 day a week, 38% occasionally, 8% not at all and 5% can’t because their job doesn’t lend itself to it.

For

70%, the New Way of

Working is mainly a question of

trust. Remote or home workers work on average 46 hours, as against 42 hours for office workers. Remote or home workers are more engaged than office workers: 32%

Source: StepStone

against 28%.

Source: Platform on the New Way of Working, Gallup Engagement survey

Office space Traffic jams

Mobile users need on average

2 m2 less

office space, i.e. 6 instead of 8 m . That’s 2

You lose

2.4 days a year if you always

because they have all their information in their compu-

drive along the E40 motorway from Zaventem to

ters so they don’t need cupboards.

Groot-Bijgaarden at rush hour.

Source : JM Bruneau

Instead of 12 minutes it takes an average of 26 minutes to cover 22 km. And, on Mondays, it takes an average of 42 minutes.

Work-life balance

Source: Inrix, 2013

Employees with a good work-life balance are

20% more productive annually.

Source: Morgan Redwood, 2009

Wireless

7

office environments out of

10

have wireless Internet access.

Source: InSites Consulting, Smart Business Strategies

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Where do we work these days (occasionally)?

At the kitchen table (29%)

On the bus (4%)

In bed (21%)

On the ground (3%)

On the train (12%)

In a café (2%)

In a hotel (12%)

Source: Fellowes, 2012

solution

Engage Pack

Sometimes happiness comes in small packages You know the problem: any employer who wants to project a positive and dynamic image these days can’t really do so without implementing the New Way of Working (or NWOW for short).

Increasingly, only employees who can use the latest technology and those who are motivated and enthusiastic enough will make the difference to your company.

80%

of the Belgian organisations that now work flexibly say that they are more productive as a result. 90% of the same organisations say that optimal flexible working is only possible in an efficient and comfortable environment. 66.6% of Belgian managers say that ICT tools are essential to be able to work flexibly. So how do you deal with that in practical terms?

Belgacom Engage Pack In order to fulfil employees’ needs and expectations without making a full-time job out of it, the IT department can use the Belgacom Engage Pack. That is the package you need to be able to work flexibly efficiently. It consists of mobile devices and the appropriate

necessary support that companies can offer their (new) employees for a fixed price per month. Employees can take their work tools everywhere with them, like a backpack.

The Belgacom Engage Pack, which is currently in its pilot phase at a customer, consists of a mobile device (a smartphone, tablet or laptop), a product warranty on the device, an insurance package against damage or theft, mobile device management (MDM), helpdesk support, device security and 4G connectivity (only for tablets and laptops). You can extend this with, for example, Office 365, Google Apps and other communication and collaboration options.

In short: everything you need as tools for cyber security, connectivity, communication and collaboration. You can choose from a

wide range of devices, too, and all this comes for a flat rate fee per workstation.

Belgacom is working with HP and others to guarantee a constant supply of devices.

The best of both worlds Belgacom combines the best of both worlds - IT and communication - with this hardware and services package.

Employers have an extra ace up their sleeves with which to attract top talent, thanks to the many different options – in terms of workstations too. It makes the new way of working much simpler and more attractive. And it’s yet another option for companies that are looking for ways to turn capital investments (capex) into operational costs (opex). Employees can choose from a wide range of mobile devices plus the various communication and collaboration tools that they need for work, in the knowledge that they have guaranteed support and a secure environment. And – last but not least – this unique offer relieves the ICT department of a lot of headaches too. The integration of the various components is done by one party; you can call on one and the same contact both to order the pack and for any additional ICT-related questions you may have afterwards.

In short: the Belgacom Engage Pack offers the best of both worlds: a wide range of state-of-the-art mobile devices – the essential tools for the new way of working – and a solution that doesn’t put unnecessary extra strain on the ICT department. On the contrary in fact. That’s quite some motivation to make it work.

If you would like more information about these packs, please send an email to engage@belgacom.be.

Summer 2014

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digitip

Your website always in the ether It’s a bit much: with large-scale online ticket sales, like those for Tomorrowland or Pukkelpop, the site usually stays in the ether, while as soon as the local football club wants to register online the server goes down. What’s the difference?

A

total of one week. That was the total period, measured from mid-November to mid-January, that some forty Belgian e-commerce sites were completely inaccessible. Some of the sites monitored failed as a result of the sharp increase in visitor traffic during Internet shopping.

That is what happened to Nespresso (a total of 14 hours’ blackout during these two months), to NewPharma (17 hours) and to Media Markt (10 hours). “Because they didn’t have a server that could cope with the massive traffic peaks, these companies may have missed a lot of customers who were shopping at the time”, says Cédric Braem of InternetVista, which carried out the study. InternetVista has put its finger on the problem, but is only telling part of the story – because constant online availability, including during peak hours, involves more than offering an extra server.

Division of labour The first answer in peak traffic is obvious: the cloud. It means you have at your disposal and can fall back on a pool of computer systems that can cope with the increase in visitors. “The cloud is an important key”, admits David Geens, CEO of hosting company Nucleus, “in the sense that you can see the cloud as a collection of hardware that can be scaled fast to suit requirements.”

Now and then you will save data in the memory, for example. Where possible you choose what’s called caching for that. Even if, in a shopping environment involving tickets, it has to be well isolated and checked. An important tip for keeping your website in the ether at all times: you

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need to build a scalable solution with what is called ‘cold standby’. This means that infrastructure is made available that can be used if the ‘primary systems’ fail.

Architecture The number of servers is one part of the story, the architecture behind them is another. “Large-scale systems are only good to host if you, as the system operator, are involved right from the beginning. Preferably even in the design of the IT architecture. Then you can help the developers with certain choices and gear your systems and code to each other”, says David Geens.

There are two different types of scalability, which are referred to as scale-up or scale-out. Scale-up is expansion of the hardware, such as adding extra capacity.

Scale-out is the distribution of the server load across several machines.

Besides that there must be constant testing.

That can be done at various levels. Consider appropriate monitoring and logging.

Testing is actually ongoing throughout the

whole process, not only when your system is live. “Doing regular load testing during development is extremely informative and allows you to make timely modifications”, suggests Geens.

And finally: it is essential for the host to have a good Internet connection. If that connection is not large enough, the website will not be available during peak periods. Belgacom is an ideal player because, as the ISP, it has direct access to the Internet backbone, which guarantees high speed and stability.

Belgacom offers a broad portfolio of cloud- and web-hosting solutions so that you are guaranteed good availability and dimensions for your online e-business infrastructure. Belgacom’s vContainer is the perfect solution for coping with peaks or for backup to the cloud.

For more info, surf to www.belgacom.be/vcontainer.

digitips

Travelling?

Enable the data roaming option that suits you best.

Why would you surf and email less on holiday than at home?

Who doesn’t enjoy using his smartphone and tablet peacefully – even abroad?

But of course, without any unpleasant surprises on your return home. From now on you can enjoy the low roaming rates of Proximus in a plan that suits your organization and mobile fleet best.

Make sure you enable your roaming option before you go abroad.

Proximus offers you for example following roaming options: For individual employees: Vodafone Mobile Internet*

• € 20/month • 300 MB

For a group of employees: Shared Data Roaming Packs

• Share a monthly data volume (from 5 to 40 GB/month) among employees who travel occasionally or are frequently abroad • No longer individual activation per card • Unlimited number of users

More info? Please contact your usual Proximus specialist or your Account Manager or surf to www.proximus.be/enterpriseroaming *Rates valid for mobile surfing within Europe+. Surf to www.proximus.be/enterpriseroaming for more info on rates excluded any pack, rates outside Europe+, the list of countries of Europe+, the rest of the world and all conditions. All prices VAT excluded. © Belgacom 2014. All rights reserved. Belgacom SA under public law, Bd. du Roi Albert II 27, B-1000 Brussels

juli 2014

Did you know? Soon Proximus will deliver your telecom and ICT solutions with the same commitment as your mobile solutions.

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digitip

New extensions for

domain names The introduction of a thousand new extensions has thoroughly shaken up the online game board. So, do you need to buy up dozens of domain names to prevent others misusing them?

T

here are reasons enough to find yourself a suitable domain name.

“To be found, for example”, suggests Philip Du Bois, General Manager of domain name manager DNS Belgium. “Domain names are really a cheap alternative to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and often work better. Just registering the name ‘baker. brussels’ can get you a lot more hits than the best and most expensive SEO tool.”

Du Bois points to Coolblue, an established name in the e-commerce world, which saves thousands of euros, according to him, thanks to the more than three thousand domain names it has registered,

from pdashop.be to beardtrimmershop. be. “An investment that is at least as good, and certainly cheaper, than SEO”, in Du Bois’s opinion. “Indeed, market research has proved that the more relevant domain names you own the greater the chance that people will find you.” He thinks it can certainly make a difference with localised domain names: “if you have a .be domain name you will get a more prominent place in Belgian searches. The chances are high that the same will happen with domain names like .gent or .antwerpen.”

Strategic choices There are other reasons, as well, for

choosing geographic extensions, thinks Bart Mortelmans, owner of domain name manager Bnamed. “A .fr or .de extension is always more difficult to remember for a Belgian than a .be domain name. The opposite is also true. So if you’re planning to open a branch in, say, the Netherlands or Hungary in the coming years, it would be advisable to register the appropriate domain names now.” Like that a domain name becomes an essential part of a total company strategy. There are other ways of using a domain name extension creatively too: by using the extension as the end of a word or a sentence for example. On www.merkendiewerken. be (in English: brandsthatwork , a striking domain name in itself) we can find some interesting examples. Blo.gs for example, or visual.ly, two websites that use geographic extensions (South Georgia & The South Sandwich Islands and Libyan Arab Jamahiriya respectively) to make an unforgettable name for – no coincidence – portal sites to blogs and visual content.

From .abogado to .yachts In total a good thousand TLDs (TopLevel Domains or extensions at the end of a domain name) are being released.

They vary from geographic indications (like .africa, .flanders or .paris) to new extensions for adult material (such as .porn or .sexy) to countless new categories for specialised businesses (from .build to .mortgage). As a brand name holder you can order them in advance in the so-called sunrise period, which precedes every complete release of any TLD. The condition is proof that you are the owner of a brand name; the Trademark Clearinghouse will take care of it. After that anyone can claim any domain name with this new extension. Important note: TLDs are obviously only English and not always interesting for Belgian solutions.

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tested

New smartphones Acer Liquid Z4 Acer has broadened its assortment of smartphones with the Liquid Z4, an excellent budget phone. In the race for ever-larger screens and ditto formats, this smartphone is like a breath of fresh air.

The Liquid Z4 is a compact smartphone with a 4-inch screen that runs on a 1.3 GHz dual core processor. The device has a 4 GB internal memory and is delivered with Android 4.2.2. At the back there is a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash. The Liquid Z4 is equipped with the newest Liquid UI. That is the graphical shell that Acer puts over Android. The interface has been given a fresh, new visual style and allows for several app

windows to be opened next to each other, so that you can easily multitask. Never been seen before on a smartphone in this price class. Nice extra: thanks to the AcerRAPID button at the back you can start the camera application really fast and take photos. The high-quality loudspeaker on the front ensures you can enjoy excellent sound, without concessions. And, what’s more, this smartphone is available for less than 100 euros. www.acer.be

Samsung Galaxy S5 Like other manufacturers, Samsung also has the challenge of improving its flagship product every year. But where do you start when last year’s phone specifications were more than good enough? Samsung has gone down the same path as last year: more or less the same appearance, a limited hardware boost and the focus on new or improved functions, such as the digital biometric fingerprint reader.

The biggest innovation is, without doubt, the waterproof design. You can hold the

Galaxy S5 underwater for half an hour without any problem. So you won’t need to worry, in future, if you happen to drop your device in the water. In addition to that, Samsung has put a heartbeat monitor at the back, under the camera. Handy for measuring your stress level in tense situations. A major improvement is the software shell that Samsung has installed over Android.

It’s a good deal less heavy than previous versions and with a lot fewer preinstalled apps too. At long last, a ‘modest, unpretentious’ phone from the Samsung stable. You can’t really call the improved functions pioneering, but that would be impossible every year. With the Galaxy S5, Samsung once again has the best smartphone of the moment. www.samsung.be

book

Your future in 350 pages Technology has an increasing impact.

Amongst other things, it has an influence on work, education, criminality and even on the choice of names for your children. At least, that’s what we read in the American bestseller ‘The New Digital Age’, by Google colleagues Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Although it’s selling like hot cakes, ‘The New Digital Age’ is no easy read. There’s not a single photo or illustration to be seen in the 350-odd pages.

But that doesn’t mean the book doesn’t have much to offer. While many books deal with just one subject in depth, the New Digital Age (‘Digitale Lente’ in the Dutch translation) offers a wide range of topics where technology plays a

role, from the Arab Spring to WikiLeaks.

Sometimes it covers fields you would not have expected. For example, parents are becoming increasingly aware that Google and co will influence their children’s future.

Sometimes they deliberately choose a unique or unusual name that can be found easily on the Internet. Others do exactly the opposite and opt for easy, popular names so that they can remain relatively anonymous on the Internet.

Nonetheless, the main topic is doing business. According to the authors, the spread of information technology will have a bigger and more permanent impact on employment opportunities than in previous periods of technological change. Robots will be able to do more and more jobs. A

lot of everyday household tasks will (finally) be automated. Washing machines will also dry, fold, iron and sort. “Even hair cutting will finally be automated”, suggest the authors. “Ideas we used to see as science fiction, such as self-driving cars and artificial intelligence, will become fact.”

The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, 19.49 euros.

Summer 2014

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