Changing the Way We Work 2/01

By Chas Knox 

If you've ever watched a University of Washington Husky football game on TV and listened to Keith Jackson sing the praises of what he calls the most beautiful setting for football that he knows of as the cameras pan out over the waters of Lake Washington, or looked at the views of Puget Sound from the Goodyear blimp covering the Mariners from Safco field, you probably think we live and work in one of the most picturesque places you can find. The mountains to the east and the sound to the west and the huge twenty five mile fresh water lake which lies between Seattle and The East Side homes is lovely to look at, but also affects our travel patterns.

This area was sculpted millions of years ago by retreating glaciers which gouged groves in the land like a giant hand dragging it's finger nails through the sand. This beautiful, yet tricky terrain, combined with an attitude of "never cut down a tree" and "No freeways or transit in my back yard", along with substantial growth generated by our industries and encouraged by Keith Jackson's comments have choked our fair city to a standstill at the ever expanding rush hours.

There is no more room on the roads to get to work and we are reluctant to spend ninety minutes each way getting to and from work each day. Those days, of course are the good ones, when it isn't raining. And you know what they say about rain here. People in Seattle don't tan, they rust. In short, we have to find another way. We have to examine the way we do business and the way we work.

Obviously, we work in a high tech field. But we do the normal office things that everyone does. We answer the phone, look at the faxes, take orders, enter accounting data, print invoices, statements, etc. Outside of the normal office routine, we write software. Three of our programmers almost never come into the office routinely. We have planning sessions and show and tell, of course, but they don't show up every day. We have four more that do come in every day, but really don't need to.

When we moved into the NSG Tower in 1991, we were doing hardware work as well as software. We needed the entire 9000 square feet of space and we used it all up. Now, the hardware is gone and so are our needs for all this space. Just reducing the space would be easy.

 What we didn't know in 1991, was, that it mattered how far you are from the phone switch. Why is this important? Because now, in the communication decade, bandwidth is everything. The closer you are to your phone switch, the greater the bandwidth you can get. Sadly, we are so far from our switch, we can't get anything but minimal connectivity at this location. You may have noticed, if you browsed our web site or downloaded something from us, it can be painfully slow.

All of these things have caused us to examine at the way we work. Now, all of our programming staff have high speed internet access at home. At the office, we have two terminal servers and for all of our development, we use a thin client/server application that works great over the Internet. Our remaining problem is still bandwidth. For this, today, we only have one practical solution. We will have to move!

This always causes great grief, expense, inconvenience, and suspension of business. All things that we all look forward to, I'm sure. But in spite of all of that, we've made the decision and leased new space. To get to our new digs, we will be leaving the city of Tukwila and moving back to the city where TOM resided for ten years, the city of Burien, Washington. Our new location, while much smaller, is less than a mile, by wire from the phone switch. This means two good things for you. First, since we're in the same exchange, our phone numbers should not change. Second, we can go from 56K to 1.1 mkb in bandwidth, for about half the cost.

We will also be dispersing our staff, from always being at the office, to more occasional office time and primarily to telecommuting. Now we are searching for new seamless phone concepts that match our location plan. We hope to be all on the same phone network, as well as VPN, even if we are no longer physically together. We still expect to most of the "normal" as well as marketing staff at the office all the time, so the people you talk to most will be on hand. The tech and development staff should still be available to you as if they were here. We already have manual ordering available to you on-line and the new personnel tracking product, The Office Manager, is completely web based, not only for software distribution bit licensing as well.

We expect, in the near future, to offer TOM licensing on the web as well. We have recently released the new pricing plans, which eliminated a number of options and created packages that we hope will simplify pricing, allowing us to create web based plans for you. You will still be able to call and talk to someone about pricing, but you may not be able to picture us in our old workplaces any more. We'll work on pictures for the web.

We hope it all goes smoothly and that you find an improved work relationship with the TOM staff you're used to dealing with. In the mean time, I'll apologize in advance for the coming down time. We all hope we can get through it with minimum interruptions.