A Tale of Two Cities

Jonathan Taylor has the demeanour of someone at ease with the world. He talks comfortably of the organisation's rise in the last 4 years, both technologically and structurally: from dial-up to SDSL and from one office of 12 people to two offices of 25.

In his rôle as Head of Finance & Operations, he estimates that less than 10% of his time is now spent on IT, half a day a week, allowing more energy to be put into Things That Are Not Well With The World, which gives The Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) its raison d'être. Going beyond simply raising environmental awareness, IEEP's research into everything environment-related aims to help it engage directly with European policy players: international agencies, national government departments, NGOs and academics. "We do a lot of Internet-based research - not all of it original - so we need instant access to policy materials, for pulling together other research and cases."

Key to IEEP's growth has been the nascence of the Belgium office and, arising out of that, all the issues that go with managing a remote centre, so the shift-up-a-gear came with the establishment of the VPN link to Brussels. The what? "I call it the IT link. It's a private tunnel over the Internet. Data is encrypted at one end and decrypted at the other office. That means we have a secure office-to-office link that no-one can hack into", says Jonathan. This Internet-based method is also a lot cheaper than leasing a dedicated line, a traditional method of buying a communication channel that is guaranteed private.

In terms of every day work the advantage this link bestows upon IEEP is that "we have one unified set of data that we can now manage here [at the London office], with the help of you guys who we know we can trust. We do have IT guys in Belgium just to replace hard drives and deal with other hardware problems." Another example of such benefits of central management comes when new research documents are released: "We can easily make shortcuts and place them everywhere on people's desktops."

Further evidence of IEEP's embrace of a distributed office strategy comes in the form of its early take-up of Outlook Web Access (OWA) allowing people to access their office email remotely. "There is a lot of travel; we have a policy of allowing staff to work at home one day a week. Previously, staff used to come down the night before [their home-work day] and email themselves documents to work on, or use auto-forwarding, but they'd have to remember to turn off the forwarding later."
It's clear that IEEP are front-runners in the sometimes controversial area of having office staff working at home since it's apparent that the 'homework' allowance may go up to 2 days. "There are many issues that I and my director are aware of, but we're beginning to get a handle on people working at home. A lot of our work is research - people always used to take home papers and work on them, so the situation is not that different to before."
IEEP are also moving to full network access, over and above just emails, via Windows Terminal Services (TS). This means the full range of documents are available, just as if one were sitting in the office at St James's Park, but from from any TS-enabled workstation and securely via relatively inexpensive Internet lines. "TS technology is set up at Brussels and we're starting to roll out TS for everyone who works at home too."
By way of example, Jonathan cites Jason's commute from Bruges to Brussels where, with his laptop and docking station, he now works around either side of picking up his daughter from school by continuing work at home. He is the first of the 6 Brussels employees trialling full TS access in the Brussels office.

The path to 'VPN freedom' was not always plain sailing: "For 6 months we felt as if we were breaking new ground". Problems were encountered with poor outgoing speed (in the Brussels direction) with the asymmetric line and upload speed. "At first we were reluctant to invest in a better telecom line, but eventually we got a better deal on SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line) with 2Mbps at around £295 and 1:1 contention." Part of the issue was that Belgium lags behind UK on deregulation, so that only a 128Kbps line will cost £400 pm, but it now has 1Mbps burstable to 2Mbps, an arrangement whereby only short peak usages are paid for instead of the full peak rate.
Co-Operative Systems did the VPN research and IEEP are now very happy with their symmetric broadband line, representing an 8-fold increase in speed for only a small percentage increase in cost, and have had no downtime in 2 years apart from some interruption after the 7/7 London bombings. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the line guarantees a 99.85% uptime with a small recompense in the event of loss, but its excellent stability means such measures remain unnecessary. Jonathan describes the Centric-supplied service as "rock solid, cheap good quality"!

Although IEEP may consider its status as a cutting-edge client has ebbed a little, along the way it became convinced of the benefits of Facilities Management (FM) and now soaks up between one day a week to 3 days/ month. "FM gives us the opportunity to consider other developments like Skype" while taking the the pressure off day-to-day management.
Perhaps the VPN project echoes a change in IEEP attitudes? "In the past it was 'go cheap' - now we know it's worth investing in IT", reflects Jonathan.