Much has changed in the last decade. Now email is ubiquitous, everyone has a BlackBerry or a smartphone which is more powerful than the laptops of a year or two ago, and we hear a great deal about how the Cloud is set to revolutionise our working and business lives.

What better time, then, for MT to team up with Fujitsu to bring you Workplace Technology Visions - a week of video interviews here on managementtoday.co.uk. Over the next five days we'll be looking at exactly how those tech changes - the Cloud in particular - are likely to play out. What opportunities will they present, and how best can these be exploited?

First up is Mark Dixon, CEO of Regus, who outlines how Regus has embraced new technologies and how he believes that the future of work will be shaped by the rise in Cloud computing. He believes that IT is becoming increasingly strategic - so chief executives must be alive, if not to the detailed workings then at least to the commercial and business potential of new technology.

In our second interview, Fujitsu UK CIO David Smith guides us into the Cloud, and explains how it is going to change the nature of business as it becomes increasingly the norm. ‘The essence of the Cloud is on-demand,’ he says. That means that instead of buying enough PCs, servers and software licenses to service your firm’s peak demands (meaning that 80% of the capacity you have splashed out on spends most of its time idle), the Cloud allows you to match supply and demand much more closely and efficiently than before.

 

Next up, Rentokil CIO Bryan Kinsella explains why Rentokil Initial opted to become one of the world's largest corporate users of the Cloud. He argues that it was pretty much a no-brainer – not least because the firm’s existing mail set-up was increasingly hard to manage.  With 35 different email products and 180 domains across the business, it was well overdue for rationalisation. One of the great strengths of the Cloud, he believes, is the way it allows firms to move infrastructure and apps to an on-demand model in a piecemeal fashion.

 

In our fourth interview, Rick Vlemmiks, commercial director of British Gas, explains how emerging new technologies can help to level the playing field for big businesses as well as small ones. ‘IT is becoming much more of a strategic enabler for us,’ he says. ‘It is what enables us to deliver differentiated service, and to benefit from real time interaction with our customers on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for example.’ The emerging Cloud-based world of social networking and always-on, connect anywhere technology permits a real dialogue between companies and customers, he says.

 

Finally, Margaret Manning, founder of digital marketing agency Reading Room, explains how the Cloud and Web 2.0 are changing our behaviour. What derails so many visions of the techno-future, says Manning, is their failure to take the human factor into account. Knowing where the technology is going is one thing; knowing how people will choose to use it is quite another. ‘We’re very social beings,’ she says. ‘We love to communicate.’ So how can businesses make the most of the Cloud and web 2.0? Technology alone isn’t the answer, she says. Instead, bosses have to learn something much harder - to trust their employees.