Home-shoring!

Many thanks to Vivienne Winterman who reports from a conference entitled Mobile and flexible working in the public sector.

Flexible working is a key issue in helping central and local government meet 'transformational' targets.  With the reduction in office space being a key requisite to fulfil this initiative, staff need to work more flexibly away from the workplace - ideally from home.

The new term for this is 'home-shoring' as coined by Kevin Breach, a Senior Advisor from ACAS who spoke at the conference.  Changing the culture of both management and staff is key to the success of flexible working.   

TFPL has recently carried out reviews for several councils movng in this direction.  They have realised that access to both internally produced and externally published information at the desktop will be a key requirement to successful out of office working.  If staff can access well managed resources via the web/intranet it will be easy for them to adapt to working from home two or three days a week.

The requirements of EDRM and e-books and e-journals are forcing organisations to look closely at how they manage and share internal documents and how they procure and manage externally published information.  Organisations need to deliver these services centrally, reduce duplication of effort, time and costs and enable the workforce to work collaboratively whether they are in the office or elsewhere.