More Remote Challenges

Computerworld - The vast majority of employees at CKE Restaurants Inc. work in the company's nationwide restaurants as district managers or in the field as real estate, marketing, human resources or training people, says Tom Lindblom, director of IT at the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based operator of 2,300 Hardee's and 980 Carl's Jr. restaurants.
Lindblom provides the infrastructure to enable them to all work productively -- "anything from communicating directives from senior execs to discussing new project rollouts or marketing campaigns to selecting restaurant sites," he says.
One of his favorite tools is a Web presentation and collaboration product called PictureTalk from Pixion Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif. It facilitates Internet presentations and collaboration using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint. "No matter what's on my desktop, I can share it, and it's highly secure" Lindblom says.
Lindblom acquired PictureTalk six months ago to assist with computer-based training. CKE trainers used to fly from site to site, teaching people for eight to 10 hours straight before flying off again. Now they break the training into a series of shorter electronic classes, each done in real time with an open phone bridge for two-way discussion. The trainer downloads a 1.2MB client application, but participants need only a browser. "Everyone participates, no one has to travel, and no one has to leave the office," Lindblom says.
He soon began to see other uses for the system. For presentations to field personnel, presenters used to e-mail materials ahead of time and then hold conference calls for discussions. "But people may skip ahead or not be paying attention," Lindblom says. With PictureTalk and a voice bridge, they're all literally on the same page.
Producing a new product guide at CKE involves people from purchasing, development, training and operations -- all in different locations. The old process used time-consuming e-mail cycles, as texts of documents were read, edited and amended, and re-sent, Lindblom says. Now one person opens the document on his desktop, and everyone can edit and see the changes in real time. "If you don't like the change, you speak up," he says. "At the end of the call, we have a completed document, everyone has participated in real time, and we've gotten rid of a tremendous amount of e-mail time."
CKE also employs videoconferencing heavily for one-to-one, one-to-many or point-to-point communications. "But if you have 10 or 15 people in different places, that becomes a lot less effective," Lindblom says.
It's also less inclusive. "Our operations management people are usually in the field visiting franchisees,