Work is a Thing You Do

As I write this week's Editor's Letter, I'm sitting in our brand new, state-of-the-art newsroom. Well, sort of, it's actually a trial space for 30-odd journalists, salesmen, publishers and IT staff to drive test new cloud-based technologies and other tools that we'll be using on a day to day basis.

It's strange, in some ways. We've been writing about mobile technologies and cloud infrastructure for years, exhorting our readership to keep up with trends and adopt new innovations, but we've been relatively slow to adjust ourselves. For instance, we've traditionally been tied to our desktops, then our laptops, as the central points through which we work. Now, with the use of Virtual Desktop Interfaces, thin clients, Citrix access software and more, the machines themselves become another tool in the newsgathering arsenal, rather than the central point around which other tools revolve.

Enterprise Mobility
All of this means, of course, that we're not expected to have butts in seats all day, inasmuch as reporters ever are expected to. To that end we only have a 60 percent desk-to-staff ratio for the eventual newsroom layout, encouraging us to work elsewhere.

Why is this applicable to financial services? Broadly it's not, in that you'll always have desk residency on trading floors and elsewhere, for infrastructural reasons if nothing else. Mobility, as a topic area, applies more to the salesperson and the executive than it does the person who actually executes the trades at a brokerage, if you're taking mobility as purely the ability to work outside of bricks and mortar.

But the technologies available now mean that if you're using a tablet, say, you're not limited in the ways that you once were. I can connect, through my iPad's Citrix Receiver, to my desktop, and run Windows 8 on the tablet itself. On the way into work, when stuck between trains on the Tube, I'm able to log on, run Excel without problems, run Word, open a web browser, file a story and carry on as normal. It's not a way of working that I'd personally choose to engage in all of the time, but for keeping an eye on your output, it's perfect.

Mobility, as a topic area, applies more to the salesperson and the executive than it does the person who actually executes the trades at a brokerage, if you're taking mobility as purely the ability to work outside of bricks and mortar.

That's the area where mobility really seems to apply to financial services. Yes, trading happens on tablets already, but there probably isn't going to be a future any time soon where the majority of flow is booked through an iPad. But being able to run professional-grade software through a tablet, I'd imagine, is of immense use to many areas of an investment firm. Even if it's only in a peripheral rather than a primary sense.