Reduce the Disparity Between Headquarters an Branch Offices by Enabling fast Access to shared Project Files

Despite the perceived prestige of a headquarters, there is an emerging trend in large organizations to deemphasize headquarters locations vs. their branch office sites. This is easy to validate, just take a look at the websites of large law firms and other professional services organizations such as architecture and engineering firms. They list their many locations in very creative ways, but likely there isn't one that is immediately identified as the "headquarters" location. Why is this so?

When asked about this trend, a variety of responses were provided including:

• "We are attempting to create a singular culture not only across locations, but also across multiple countries and continents."

• "After all of our mergers and acquisitions, we decided to stop recognizing one particular location as the headquarters."

• "We want to demonstrate to customers that the nearest branch office location is well equipped and equally capable of serving their needs."

While it is impressive to see an emphasis on customers, employees and cultures in these responses, there was little mention of how technology contributes to this phenomenon.

The Fading Headquarters Advantage

Not long ago, headquarters had one big advantage over other locations which was ease of collaboration. Most of an organization's management and project focused employees were located at the headquarters facility and it was easy for them to meet and access the latest information, including current project files. Over time, as these organizations grew and added branch offices, project teams became more dispersed which created a new set of challenges related to collaboration. Fortunately, technology advanced and improved the social aspects of collaboration for remote project teams via VoiP technology, instant messaging and web conference services like GoToMeeting, but most organizations still struggle with enabling high performance access to up-to-date project files at their branch locations like they have at headquarters.

The most common reason for this is that headquarters is the keeper of a central file repository which translates to remote teams having to access project files via a corporate wide area network (WAN) connection that is significantly slower than accessing files at headquarters. In fact, a recent survey on file sharing and collaboration practices conducted by Cadalyst reported that 85% of survey respondents in branch offices had WAN connection speeds of less than 100 Mbps, not even 1/10th the speed of a typical 1000 Mbps local area network (LAN) connection found inside most office facilities.

Simply put, this means that remote user productivity is throttled by the WAN connection. In many cases this leads to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, even for small and medium size organizations, caused by users waiting for files to upload and download along with other file management issues like version conflicts and overwritten files - problems rarely experienced in a headquarters scenario.

Optimize Branch Office File Management and Productivity

Fortunately there are solutions out there to help you get a handle on these and other file management challenges experienced at your branch offices. A great place to start is downloading and reading The Ultimate Guide to CAD File Collaboration by Robert Green. The guide provides valuable information on how to identify file sharing and collaboration related challenges in multisite environments, and evaluate potential solutions along with their benefits and ROI.