The biggest challenge in a service company is engineering operations. Technology is the easy part, but the orchestration of everything working seamlessly is a mammoth undertaking. I think the culture of the company plays an important role. Again culture is a loaded term, so I will try to be more specific. Every software organization has to make a choice on whether it wants to run the company with engineering precision or run it as an innovation center. These choices are to a large extent mutually exclusive(debatable.. look at Japanese innovation model).
If you are running an organization with engineering precision, you are focussed on words like productivity, optimization. You track employee's work schedule, productive time. It is a cost play, where you are reducing your cost to increase your bottom line. This model is followed by a lot of service companies successfully in India. Product companies are more innovation focused and hence need to allow slack in the system to attract the free running rock stars.
Coming back to my original point, if a service company has a culture of engineering precision(probably the best option), then running it using virtual office might not be an efficient choice. The very concept of remote working introduces too much slack into the system which will overwhelm any service company with the culture of engineering precision.
I am still exploring various techniques and research material, specifically enterprise 2.0 literature to figure out if a service company can be run efficiently with a virtual office and I will continue to post my research as I progress.
Wow, this is interesting !!
ReplyDeleteYou have very rightly mentioned culture of engineering precision, and it is a tough call if we ask for virtual offices. Even if we try and suppose the remote office concept as part of engineering precision, it becomes really difficult to tap things such as costs, man-hours, productivity etc.
Yet, I feel the virtual offices model might work for small service companies or start-ups as it becomes easier to track things for engineering team for a lesser head count, but eventually as the head count increases companies might have to adopt the other way i.e. non virtual office model. Otherwise, I also see virtual offices as a cost saving thing that can be really beneficial to the start-ups.
Though I strongly feel, companies focusing on creating innovation centers are the ones that will be going to get the best out of their employees. By providing the best facilities and a good environment at the work place, the companies can trigger the thinking minds of their rock stars which is not in the hands of a company when its a vitual office concept. Even the Micheal Angelo of coding cannot be any creative if the enviroment is not good(focussed) and in a non-virtual office model company takes control of providing the best to its thinking minds....
I agree with your comments on the virtual office concept working out for the startups in the service industry. It all depends on the execution, but I have my doubts. Maybe I can start one :).
ReplyDeleteI think a software service company can completely be run as a virtual office. Because there's a lot of good online tools and applications out there that could help us to create a virtual office with staff from all over the world..
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