Over three months, earlier this year, I assisted the ASB Bank transfer from a desk-based environment to an unbound one in an adventurous change that preceded a move to a radically designed new building down on Auckland's North Wharf, near the Viaduct Basin.
With the move now complete, I received permission to visit the new building and see how it all went.
Almost every staff member in the central Auckland tower that headquartered the ASB in New Zealand was offered the choice of a laptop (Windows-based ultrabook), an iPad and/or an iPhone (if they already used a company Blackberry). Wisely, these were rolled out in the three months before the major building shift to increase familiarity. We fairly quickly established that those who initiated reports, projects and other ventures would probably need ultrabooks while those who primarily communicated, presented and tapped into existing information would be happy with iPads. Around one-and-a-half thousand iDevices were rolled out, iPhone 4S at around two-thirds, and one-third iPads. The devices were set up in 12-person group sessions with the security and personal information needed to function in the bank's very secure environment, and then secondary sessions were initiated to bring people up to speed with iDevice use. Finally, casual afternoon and Friday drop-in sessions covered questions, tips, problem solving and advice.
The iPads could all securely tap into the Exchange-served environment and it was a bit strange (especially for me) to see people using Word, PowerPoint and Excel remotely, with their fingers, via iPad 4 screens. This, clearly, was not that great for working all day long; anyone who needed to do that was better with an ultrabook or logged into a terminal. But contacts, email and other communication and presenting tasks were a cinch with the iPads. Although Outlook could be accessed on the server, the Mail app was set up to sync with it anyway, as was Contacts.
At the end of June people started moving into the North Wharf building in drafts. They immediately logged into the Exchange system the bank used and carried on working.
Since the hundreds of staff members had already assimilated a major change in device use (before that, almost everyone arrived at work and logged into a terminal) the quite radical change of environment seemed to have gone incredibly smoothly.
