Swan out of the office, says Cygnet

Brian Higton is a man who practises what he preaches. From his home in the small village of Darvel near Kilmarnock, Higton runs an IT solutions company that promises to turn your house into a fully fledged office.

Distributed working may sound like a new management technique for shifting awkward tasks on to somebody else's desk, but it is actually the ethos behind Cygnet Solutions' OfficeVenue package.

Higton argues that, with most cities facing traffic congestion problems and commercial property prices going through the roof, it makes economic, social and environmental sense for fewer people to embark upon the daily grind of commuting.

Indeed, he believes that the information age could take us full circle from the factories of the industrial revolution back to the days of the agricultural revolution, when people worked in small units from home. "We have been around for something like 10 million years and it is only for the last 200 years that we have done this peculiar thing of going to one particular place to work," he says. "And now technology means we don't have to do that any more."

Recent advances in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology have enabled Cygnet to bring the OfficeVenue product to market. The package enables audio traffic - such as a phone conversation - to be coded as data, sent down an internet connection and then decoded at the other end. Put simply, this means you can be on the internet and have a phone conversation at the same time without having to pay for two connections.

After the initial set-up cost, VoIP gives unmetered access to the internet and enables employees working from home to be permanently online, therefore performing all the functions they would normally do in the office such as using e-mail, sending faxes and speaking on the phone. Higton believes it could lead to an average yearly call- charge saving of (pounds) 14,000 for each employee.

The IP phone system routes calls through to the most appropriate person, wherever they are, and uses an onscreen display to let each member of staff know whether their colleagues are working, are already on the phone or are out of the office.

Higton says OfficeVenue differs from other home-office systems on the market because it is designed to provide all the tools you would expect in an office and to deliver a seamless service to customers and clients.

"Some technology, such as remote dial-up, has been around for years," he explains. "I would describe what's out there as bags of bits - disconnected bits of technology which help but don't provide a business solution. Users are left to assemble these bits to allow them to work from home."

Higton left his job as sales and marketing director with Motherwell-based integration systems provider Scomagg Ltd to set up Cygnet with Suzanne Flynn and Dr Bill Jack eight years go.

The company was formed around the idea of developing effective flexible working technology - a notion many people saw as an ugly duckling at a time when the internet and e-mail were very much in their infancy. But that didn't stop Cygnet achieving a turnover of (pounds) 100,000 in its first year.

In 1996 Cygnet began developing OfficeVenue to take its experience of distributed working and encapsulate it in a product. Flynn says that she and the team were determined to remove the stigma attached to working away from the office.

"Companies should judge people by output, but what tends to happen is that managers judge people by bums on seats," she says. "The UK has a huge long hours culture but the reality is that if we were better managers people would be working fewer hours and would be more productive."

Cygnet Solutions now has 25 employees and an office at the Scottish Enterprise Technology Park in East Kilbride. Its turnover has risen to (pounds) 1.5m this year and last month it received (pounds) 500,000 of funding from a consortium led by the Bank of Scotland and including UK Steel Enterprise, Scottish Enterprise Lanarkshire and North Lanarkshire Council.

A number of Scottish firms including Glasgow-based solicitors Macdonald Henderson have already taken on OfficeVenue, and Higton is convinced there is a huge market for it - which he believes could really take flight once companies realise the cost and efficiency savings.

"We have got a proposition that improves life for employees and which, done properly, can save employers money on the bottom line," he says.

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