Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Smart Work, Cities, Planet
Somebody should write a book about Cisco's pioneering corporate culture -- of all the Cisco employees I know, not a one of them goes to the office M-F, 9-5. More likely, they live hundreds of miles away on their ranch, or near their aging parents, or in some dream location of their choosing. They "come to work," via the Internet and telephone, or via videoconferencing, a technology that Cisco has done so well it deserves to be called telepresence. Employee visits to the mother ship are on an as-needed basis.
You may think I'm being paid from Cisco to write this. Not even close; I'm an enthusiast. I am attending Cisco's Connected Urban Development in Amsterdam completely on my own nickel. Full disclosure: Cisco is a sponsor of certain isen.com activities, but the sponsoring organization is not connected to the CUD effort except at the very top of the hierarchy. I WISH I could get more involved in spreading the fact that Cisco's telepresence is a huge leap beyond everything else I've seen, but so far, Cisco has not embraced my advances. So -- full disclosure -- I am hoping Cisco will see this post for what it is, Isenberg sucking up because he believes the technology could actually help take cars off the road in his little corner of Connecticut and a significant number butts out of airplane seats worldwide, and he wants to help. Further disclosure -- there's lots of Cisco technology (e.g., filtering, "managed" network services, etc.) that I wish it'd lose.
Now Cisco has officially launched its first Smart Work Center in Almere, a city near Amsterdam. Smart Work Centers are designed to provide work related services like offices, big-pipe Internet connections, conference rooms, telepresence facilities, child care (hej this is Holland!), food service (and support for all of these) so knowledge workers can come to work without coming to the downtown office. The first tenants at the Almere Smart Work Center are HP, IBM and the city of Amsterdam. Several more smart work centers are under construction around the Netherlands. I am curious to see how the concept actually works, and what we learn from it. I'll be visiting the Almere center later today.
The newspaper says that Cisco plans to charge somewhere around 7800 Euro per year per seat at these centers, about half of what it figures a standard HQ-based office costs. In Almere, it figures it only needs to take 3000 cars off the highway to make a 10% dent in the Almere-Amsterdam rush hour auto traffic. I wish the effort every success.
More soon . . .
You may think I'm being paid from Cisco to write this. Not even close; I'm an enthusiast. I am attending Cisco's Connected Urban Development in Amsterdam completely on my own nickel. Full disclosure: Cisco is a sponsor of certain isen.com activities, but the sponsoring organization is not connected to the CUD effort except at the very top of the hierarchy. I WISH I could get more involved in spreading the fact that Cisco's telepresence is a huge leap beyond everything else I've seen, but so far, Cisco has not embraced my advances. So -- full disclosure -- I am hoping Cisco will see this post for what it is, Isenberg sucking up because he believes the technology could actually help take cars off the road in his little corner of Connecticut and a significant number butts out of airplane seats worldwide, and he wants to help. Further disclosure -- there's lots of Cisco technology (e.g., filtering, "managed" network services, etc.) that I wish it'd lose.
Now Cisco has officially launched its first Smart Work Center in Almere, a city near Amsterdam. Smart Work Centers are designed to provide work related services like offices, big-pipe Internet connections, conference rooms, telepresence facilities, child care (hej this is Holland!), food service (and support for all of these) so knowledge workers can come to work without coming to the downtown office. The first tenants at the Almere Smart Work Center are HP, IBM and the city of Amsterdam. Several more smart work centers are under construction around the Netherlands. I am curious to see how the concept actually works, and what we learn from it. I'll be visiting the Almere center later today.
The newspaper says that Cisco plans to charge somewhere around 7800 Euro per year per seat at these centers, about half of what it figures a standard HQ-based office costs. In Almere, it figures it only needs to take 3000 cars off the highway to make a 10% dent in the Almere-Amsterdam rush hour auto traffic. I wish the effort every success.
More soon . . .
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