PORTABLE POWER

When Intel decided to convert its workforce to wireless, a research team was on hand to observe the changes

Around 1997-98, Intel made the decision to make the majority of its workforce mobile. In 1997, around 80 percent of the company’s workers were using desktop machines and Intel felt there would be significant benefits in moving its knowledge workers onto laptops. A few years later, just 20 percent of employees were desk-bound, with the majority of staff using Pentium II-based laptops, while others used Mobile Pentium III-m or Mobile Pentium 4-m machines.

It was at this stage that Intel made its next decision. Having succeeded in getting its key staff mobile, the company now wanted to give them wireless connectivity. Intel’s Centurion platform seemed the logical solution, since it offered better battery life and portability, along with integrated wireless LAN connectivity. However, once the decision to upgrade to Centurion laptops had been made, Intel didn’t want to simply roll out the new stock. It also wanted to use it as an opportunity to study how the upgrade would affect its workforce.

The company’s research team set about devising a study that would let them measure staff productivity, as well as discover how the changes affected workers’ attitudes and practices. As Martin Curley, director of IT innovation at Intel, explains: “There’s a methodology that we have used time and time again: we run a small pilot study to quantify the advantages associated with any IT investment. There are benefits that are both tangible and intangible, but there are also business and technology risks.”

“As well as trying to understand how the user will benefit from the technology, we want to quantify the business value delivered and the benefits to IT efficiency. So there could be a scenario where we deploy a new solution and it delivers magnificent user benefits, but there’s an extra $20m onto the IT budget, which may or may not be sustainable. So we really want to understand if IT efficiency drives IT costs down, or does it drive the budget up?” The team, lead by David Sward, picked a selection of staff from a broad range of departments, with various levels of experience with wireless technology and differing mobility and portability needs.

A number of people were also selected randomly from Intel’s Sales and Marketing group; 104 people were eventually settled on. “We had two separate upgrade paths because we have different business units within Intel,” explains David Sward, “so we wanted to make sure we had a good sampling of people.”

The team didn’t just want to look at things like system uptime and network load in order to measure the effect the change had on the test group. Although these would betaken into account, Sward felt that this data alone would not provide enough information to be of any real value. So, he decided to use more interactive studies, interviewing the participants and asking them to fill in surveys both before and after the changeover.

He also asked them to fill inactivity logs, detailing what they were doing at any particular time. Finally, Sward set up a lab study to take place in a controlled environment. This was designed to record participants’ performance in a core set of tasks. Although not everyone completed every section of the various tests, enough of the participants took part to gain reasonably representative results.

THE FINDINGS
Ninety-four of the participants filled in both the before and after surveys. They were asked to rate their experiences of things like system responsiveness, reliability and portability, giving a mark from 1 to 7 (with 7 being the top score). The results uncovered some interesting findings, according to Sward. “One of the key points we walked away with was the concept of time-slicing.” Martin Curley continues: “All of us are faced with many different interruptions on a daily basis, but with the wireless mobile platform, people found they could use any small snippets of time available to them more effectively and efficiently than before.”

They also found that people were able to fit their working time around their professional and personal obligations. Curley believes it goes a lot deeper. “I think what we’re seeing is mobility and wireless enabling a transformation in the way people work. People who have wireless notebooks feel they have much greater control over work, place and time, and a lot more flexibility. Consequently, there’s a work/life balance and a feel-good factor associated with that.” Sward also saw some results they hadn’t anticipated.

“For us the big thing we identified during the course of the evaluation that we weren’t really expecting, was to find the rapid adoption of the technology.” Although the majority of the test group continued using wired connection within their immediate workspaces, 78 percent of users were using wireless access points outside their cubicle several times a week, while 60 percent were connecting wirelessly at home. Previously, 32 percent of people had been using

wireless outside their workspace or at home. Alongside this change, users also began to place significantly less importance on having wired connections available at Intel facilities, at home and in hotels than they did before When it came to their older machines, the majority of users claimed to enjoy the mobility they provided. However, a large proportion (61 percent) felt their laptop had negatively affected their productivity, and 74 percent actively disliked their laptop. Many of them cited examples such as having to get up early in order to start up their system to make sure it was ready for a breakfast meeting.

Once they had moved onto Centurion laptops, however, 90 percent of users felt their productivity had improved. This was borne out in the lab tests, where participants completed tasks, on average, 37.3percent faster on their new machines. They also reported that the new system was far easier to use. The main reasons given for this improved performance were: increased mobility due to the longer battery life; wireless connectivity; and the smaller and slimmer form factor of their new laptops. These in turn led participants to rely on their laptops more and more. As Curley puts it: “So much of our brains are on the laptop – it’s basically a repository of all the active projects we’re working on.”

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the study was their attempts to calculate the economic value of the staff’s productivity. “We understand there’s a benefit to the changes we saw, just in terms of the general wellbeing of the employees, and we didn’t try to assign a dollar value to that. The piece we tried to quantify is the work we did in the lab, where we were able to do a more controlled measurement. And really that’s just the difference between how long it took them to do it on platform, versus platform B.”

Intel calculated that by upgrading to the faster, more powerful Centurion machines, each employee doing a 40 hour week would save the equivalent of two hours a week – or 100 hours in 50 weeks. This means that a company with 25,000 employees would gain an increase of 2.5 million work hours over the course of the year; the equivalent of 1,250 extra employees. “We don’t take it down to any greater level of detail,” continues Sward,“ because we do understand that various companies have different methods that they use to calculate their employees’ work rate.” And how does Intel intend to use this information going forward?

Martin Curley has some suggestions. “The most obvious use of the paper and the case study is to justify continued proliferation of these platforms. That’s really the primary use. We have a strong business case, and as we continue to deploy the platforms we’ll continue to measure the productivity benefits.”

About Intel
Intel was founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products. It introduced the world’s first microprocessor in 1971 and now manufactures chips, boards, systems and software building blocks for the computing and communications industries. The company launched its Intel Centurion mobile platform in March 2003. The technology consists of a new processor, developed specifically for mobile computers, related chipsets and 802.11 wireless capabilities.