The next visit was across Darling Harbour to Tower Three in the new Barangaroo precinct and the Sydney office of KPMG. Pairing the Google and KPMG visits made an interesting study in contrasting similarity. Google leaves the impression that their hip-and-happening work environment is as effortless as ordering a skinny vanilla latte from Jasper down at the Broo’d on the way to work. KPMG have made a very conscious effort to create an innovative work environment with a journey more akin to organising an expedition to the Congo to collect coffee beans. While Google may be the nirvana, the KPMG experience probably has more resonance for the public service facing similar expeditions into the humid jungles of open-plan offices.
Pictures will be a little sparse in this post because we were asked not to take any. KPMG’s work is commercially sensitive so even an innocent snapshot might have inadvertent consequences. While it would be easy to make fun of an accounting firm’s grey-suited anxiety it should be noted for balance that although we had wide ranging access to Google’s meeting rooms in the previous visit we were never given any access to the actual work areas. You can get your sanctioned glimpse of the KPMG work environments here.
The KPMG journey to a new work environment was triggered by the end of office leases elsewhere in Sydney and a chance to consolidate in Barangaroo. The senior executives also seized it as an opportunity to remake the organisation as a role model of an agile, adaptable, wave-of-disruption-riding outfit they had been advising their clients about in reports on the future of technology-enabled mobile workforces.
The edict came down that no-one, not even the CEO, were going to have an office, or even a fixed desk, in the new building 1. The ‘can’t be done’ issues were reframed as ‘what is needed to make it happen?’ discussions.
It wasn’t all top-down direction however. Prototype offices were set up for teams to rotate through and provide feedback on the final design. Little, but important, changes were made in this process such as the lockers needing to be a comfortable height so people coming in the morning had a convenient place to put their coffee while rummaging in their locker.
The layout is in three parts: a focus area of workstations, a collaborative zone with less formal furniture for small groups to meet and work and pop-in rooms to take calls or have more formal meetings. And in a similar vein to Google, these areas are connected with communal corridors and kitchens (several small and one large) which also act as informal meeting spaces. Senior partners are encouraged to spend time in the kitchen areas so as to be accessible to a broader range of staff, although there was no description on the form of this encouragement. The segmented approach is the latest iteration of office design beyond the pure open-plan concept of rows of un-partitioned desks which is now quickly falling out of favour as not such a productive idea after all.
The whole set-up is predicated on having the mobile technology that allows a worker to easily move between areas as their work evolves during a workday. Within KPMG the same technology means people can be found by the location of their network connection 2. On a broader scale it also means a blurring of the boundary between work and home and the calculations of hot-desking space requirements were based on forecasts of numbers not needing office space because of working from home or being on the road working with clients (roughly a third of the employees are not in the building at any given time). Although flexibility is great, the implications of a 24/7 connection to work may not be – the first debates about the right to disconnect are already playing out.
KPMG also set up an Innovation Lab in the new building as deliberate attempt to ‘disrupt’ their clients and expose them to emerging technologies like virtual reality and 3D-printing in order to prompt thinking about the impact on their business.
The ‘chairs’ in the Innovation Centre were certainly disruptive…
The finally presentation at KPMG was about their efforts in big data analytics and how they are supporting the development of a new generation of tools to help their clients make sense of the data deluge. The application suite demonstrated was called Bottlenose Nerve Center which aims to aggreate, analyse, and visualise large amounts of data. Two examples provided were the real-time monitoring of social media and the analysis of call centre logs.
In the first, the demonstration was around the application being able to use natural language processing to watch for negative and positive words associated with social media about a client company. The real-time visualisation meant that negative events, say user frustration at a slow web service, could be detected quickly and efforts made to avoid reputation damage. In the longer term the tools could be used to measure customer sentiment, perhaps around key events like a product launch.
The same big data tools could also be applied inwardly and we were taken through a sophisticated data analysis of call centre logs. The data was able to track how excess data usage alerts on mobile phones led to complaint calls and how many of those calls led in turn to an upgrade sale. The data was even able to show that there were fewer upgrade sales in the weekends because casual staff hadn’t necessarily been trained to make the appropriate sales pitch.
It was all impressive stuff and a pointer to the clever tools that are out there now to manage and use big data like social media. With heads very full from a busy day, the study tour participants dispersed across the twilight-lit city to reconvene the following day in North Sydney. On the way back to the hotel, I had an excellent spaghetti bolognese on the Barangaroo waterfront, but promptly failed my innovation lessons in forgetting to take a picture of it for social media and make my small contribution to data analysis. Which is extra disappointing as it turns out, because apparently taking a photo of your food before you eat it can make it taste better. #whoknew #excitingtimes #spagbol
