Solution Overview Cisco Smart Work Centers: Foster Urban ... · space and business services, the employees’ experience, and the collaborative experience with people throughout the

Solution Overview

Cisco Smart Work Centers: Foster Urban Regeneration, Social Inclusion, and Reduced Carbon Footprint

Solution OverviewCisco Smart Work Centers

© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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• Cities create public spaces near residential neighborhoods, where people can work, meet, and use shared services such as secure wireless Internet access, telepresence, collaboration tools, and business services, including reception, catering, and day care.

• Employers can use these spaces to offer flexible 21st-century work options, including teleworking and coworking (independent workers sharing a facility).

• Giving people a place to work and meet near home reduces commute time, greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion.

• An open workspace creates opportunities for new social and business connections for entrepreneurs, professional mobile workers, knowledge workers, company employees, community groups, youth groups, and senior citizens.

• Local authorities can create Cisco Smart Work Centers cost-effectively by using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and tested reference architectures.

Cities striving toward economic, social, and environmental sustainability are finding practical solutions through the Cisco® Smart+Connected Communities initiative. This solution overview, intended for local government executives, explains one aspect of Cisco Smart+Connected Communities: Cisco Smart Work Centers (SWCs).



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Opportunity: A Choice of Where and How to WorkCities become Smart+Connected Communities when they link people, devices, infrastructures, services, and information over broadband networks. One benefit is that knowledge workers have a choice of where and how to work. Avoiding long commutes to the main office increases productivity, decreases traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, and improves work-life balance.

Even people who already work from a home office sometimes need access to a professional office. They might need services not available at home, such as telepresence or a conference room. In addition, many mobile workers and teleworkers appreciate the opportunity for in-person connection. A creative and intellectually stimulating environment contributes to the innovation that fuels today’s economy.

Local authorities and other employers can empower knowledge workers and entrepreneurs by creating Cisco Smart Work Centers near residential neighborhoods. Technologies that help people work productively in Cisco Smart Work Centers include the following.

• Rich media and business video: Seeing facial expressions and body language improves communications, increasing the speed of decision making.

• Presence and instant messaging: Being able to see whether coworkers are on the phone or online helps workers reach people the first time they try, simplifying collaboration.

• Enterprise social networking: Giving individuals, teams, and communities a forum to connect, share, learn, and collaborate can increase innovation, productivity, and quality.

• Secure, borderless enterprise: Workers can access enterprise applications and data and their colleagues anywhere, anytime, over a wired or wireless connection.

• Connected workplace: The physical workspace optimizes use of space, provides tools for network-based collaboration, and is energy-efficient.



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Smart Work Center OverviewDesigned for local authorities, the Smart Work Center is a flexible blueprint giving mobile workers, other knowledge workers, and community groups a new way of working. People who work in the centers can meet either in person or virtually, using ultra-fast Internet access, high-definition video communication technologies, and advanced collaboration and business video technologies.

Professional support services include reception and concierge, language translation, printing, child care, catering, and more. Energy-management technologies help to lower energy consumption and energy bills, as well as the city’s ecological footprint.

The city government can act as an anchor tenant, and invite local employers of all sizes to participate.

A network of Cisco Smart Work Centers provides the following benefits for the community, local authority, businesses, professional mobile workers, youth, and elderly citizens.

• Creating new ways to work and collaborate: Today’s workers rely on collaboration, self-regulation, and access to expertise inside and outside the traditional organization. Knowledge workers can visit the centers to find a collaborative environment and advanced technology close to home (Table 1).

• Optimizing use of municipal space and buildings: Shared services increase operational efficiency and reduce costs.

• Reducing ecological footprint: Rather than drive to the office to meet with coworkers, partners, and customers, workers can visit the nearest Smart Work Center to collaborate in person or virtually, using business video and collaboration tools. In addition, the centers use energy-saving technologies, such as Cisco EnergyWise, to power down network devices when not in use.

• Improving productivity: Reducing commute time improves productivity, as do collaboration tools such as presence, which shows whether coworkers are currently online or on the phone and how they prefer to be reached.

• Improving work-life balance: Less time spent travelling and driving creates more time for home life, work, or both. Knowledge workers also appreciate having a socially supportive meeting place. The center operator has the option to provide onsite child care and other amenities.



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Smart Work OperationsThe network of Cisco Smart Work Centers operational model includes the physical space and business services, the employees’ experience, and the collaborative experience with people throughout the community.

• Smart workplace: At a Smart Work Center location, the local authority, enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses, and entrepreneurs can rent dedicated space or use available space in the flexible workplace. The smart workplace provides a variety of services, including:

• Building and facility management services

• Information and communications technology (ICT) services

• Postbox registration

• Reception and concierge

• Language interpretation

• Printing

• Child care

• Catering

• Virtual Citizen Services: allowing citizens to interact with civil servants in other physical locations face to face, through telepresence

Table 1Cisco Smart Work Centers Benefit Workers and Businesses, the Local Authority, and the Community

Workers and Businesses Local Authority Community

• Offers economies of scale through sharing centralized facility and technology services

• Provides a professional infrastructure and business support, stimulating the creation and use of innovative services through new partnerships and business models

• Creates an empowering business and social workspace

• Fosters worker autonomy and flexibility

• Contributes to work-life balance by reducing commute time

• Reduces workspace overhead, space requirements, real estate costs, and building operation costs

• Creates spaces for people to meet in person or virtually, for business or social activities

• Increases workforce productivity with advanced collaboration tools

• Encourages innovation by providing the needed technology, services, and work and life spaces

• Reduces traffic congestion

• Provides a vision and infrastructure for tomorrow’s resilient community, including how work will be done

• Facilitates new patterns of work while enhancing economic output, social cohesion, and community attractiveness

• Creates competitive, innovative, sustainable work-life environment fostering choice of where, when, and how to work

• Lowers ecological footprint through reducing time to travel and better building and energy management



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All services are designed to be secure, highly professional, conducive to social interaction, and energy-efficient. For example, lights in a particular area only turn on when a worker assigned to that area signs in.

• Smart working experience: Workers can use any available workspace and any service, in any Smart Work Center in the network. An employee who usually works in the center closest to home, for example, might occasionally reserve a Cisco TelePresence® Active Collaboration Room in a center closer to a customer or coworker. Mobile workers securely access their employer’s applications and services over the network, enjoying the same application experience they would have at the office. A single sign-on in the reception area personalizes the Cisco Unified IP phone with the employee’s personal phone number and speed dials, adjusts lighting based on the employee’s preferences, logs on to the virtual desktop, and so on.

• Smart work society: Workers in Cisco Smart Work Centers, offices, and educational institutions can securely collaborate over the network (Figure 1). All entities gain economies of scale by sharing centralized services such as office and conference room reservations, unified communications, and multipoint video.

Figure 1In a Smart Work Society, Workers Can Connect to Their Employer’s Network from Anywhere

U N I V E R S I T YU N I V E R S I T Y

Network of Smart Work Centers

Enterprise Public Administration

University

SWC

SWC

VMware ESX Server

VMware ESX Server



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Use Case Scenarios at the Smart Work CenterJohn and Mary, both in their 30s, live in a suburb of a mid-sized European city with their 3-year old daughter Isabel and Mary’s father Harry, age 72.

A project manager at city hall, John often works from home or in a Smart Work Center just a 10-minute walk from home. John is also enrolled in a graduate university’s distance-learning program, and views real-time video lectures or video either at home or in a quiet room in the Smart Work Center. Mary is a freelance graphics designer, working primarily from home and sometimes meeting with partners and clients at the Smart Work Center.

Use Case Scenario 1: Virtual Citizen Services

Mary submits a passport-renewal application through the local authority website. Instructed to present identification at city hall, Mary calls the municipality’s nonemergency number to ask if she can meet from the Smart Work Center, using the Virtual Citizen Services kiosk. The civil servant agent schedules the virtual meeting for the next morning.

Before the appointment, Mary walks to the Smart Work Center and leaves Isabel at the day care center. In the reception area, the virtual receptionist, appearing life-size on a telepresence display, greets Mary and directs her to the Virtual Citizen Service kiosk. At the scheduled time, the civil servant at city hall appears on the display. When Mary realizes she forgot her photographs, the civil servant takes a snapshot from the video screen, crops the image, and attaches it electronically to the passport application. In a week, Mary can pick up her passport at the Smart Work Center.

Use Case Scenario 2: Teleporting and Coworking

After her passport appointment, Mary takes the opportunity to get some work done. She selects an available flexible workspace and signs on to the IP phone to personalize it with her phone number and speed dials. She calls a customer to discuss a brochure design. After a few minutes the customer asks to see some examples, so Mary initiates a Cisco WebEx® session so that she and the customer can both share their desktops.

That afternoon, Mary meets one of her partners and a client in the collaboration conference room, which Mary had reserved. She simply presses a button on the IP phone in the room to begin a face-to-face telepresence session with a specialist in North America, brainstorming ideas for a major product launch.



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Use Case Scenario 3: Incubator

Mary’s partner Sheila recently received a certificate in video editing, and mentioned to Mary that her current client’s manual processes for sharing and storage increase time and costs. Mary told Sheila about another Smart Work Center with special tools for video editing and production.

Sheila now works regularly at the center, which is equipped with small recording studios containing high-definition video cameras, digital editing workstations with multiple screens, and data center services for storing and processing high-definition video. Sheila has even established relationships with major video-editing companies that also use the Smart Work Center. One is with a video distributor that uses the Cisco Show and Share® platform to make videos available to authorized users.

Use Case Scenario 4: Learning and Teaching at a Distance

In addition to working with the local authority, John is an MBA student at a well-regarded university 1000 kilometers away. This semester he needs to attend live lectures regularly, and joins the classroom either from home or the Smart Work Center.

To attend today’s lecture, John reserved the telepresence unit at the Smart Work Center for himself and two other local classmates. Arriving early, he drops off Isabel at the day care center. He signs into the center by presenting his biometric ID card. When he sits down in his flexible workspace, he is already logged in to the Cisco Virtualization Experience client, a zero client attached to the Cisco Unified IP Phone. When John works on assignments, he can use the same university applications he could use if he were physically present on campus. During the lecture, John sees the professor and students on two high-definition LCD displays in the flexible workspace.

After attending the lecture virtually, John and his classmates sit down in a Cisco Active Collaboration Room they had previously reserved. With the touch of a button they join two other classmates in another Smart Work Center in the other side of the city to work on a team assignment. They collaborate as if they were together in person by using the video IP phones and projection screens for their Cisco WebEx session.



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Functional OverviewThe network of Cisco Smart Work Centers provides secure, ultra-high-speed connectivity to any network that workers need to access, including employer or university networks. Workers can connect with any device, including their own laptops, tablets, and smartphones as well as the center’s own telepresence systems, video IP phones, and zero clients (Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients).

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) VPNs protect all traffic that travels between the Smart Work Center and other networks. Quality of Service (QoS) gives priority to latency-sensitive traffic such as voice, video, and high-definition multimedia applications. This helps to provide a high-quality experience without interfering with the performance of other applications on the network.

Figure 2Smart Work Center Functional Architecture

Terminals Network Access Public Networks

Core Specialized Services Networks

Managed Services Provider

CRM

User Registration

UC

WLC

ISE

VPN

EW Orchestrator

Public Administration Enterprise Education

TelePresence Network

H REAP dVLAN

H REAP dVLAN

PoE EW 802.1X dVLAN 802.11AE

ISR G2 2900 w PVDM3

Virtual Desktops

PSTN

S+CC MPLS-VPN medianet

WebEx Mediatone Network

ASA

ASA

TelePresence Videoconference Exchange

PSTN GW

Public Internet

IXP

VMware ESX Server

Smart phone, Laptop, Tablet (with HS 2.0/iWLAN)

IP Video Phone 8941 | 8945

TP BoothEX 60 | 90

Phone BoothE20

IP Video Phone 9951 | 9971+ VXC 2100

Active CollaborationRoom

VXC 2200



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The MPLS network interconnects all Cisco Smart Work Centers in the metropolitan area, allowing individual centers to share managed services such as secure wireless access, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), unified communication, IP video telephony, telepresence collaboration rooms, digital signage, a web-based room reservation system, and many other services. Shared services provide economies of scale, reducing the capital and operational expense to establish and maintain new centers.

Technical OverviewThe network of Cisco Smart Work Centers and individual centers take advantage of COTS technology (Tables 2 and 3). Cisco also provides reference architectures and blueprints, accelerating implementation and reducing risk.

Table 2Technical Components of Network of Cisco Smart Work Centers

Network Services Cisco Products

Real-time communications • Cisco Unified Communications Manager

• Cisco Unity® Unified Messaging

• Cisco Packet Voice Digital Signal Processor Module (PVDM) and Voice/WAN Interface Card (VWIC)

• Cisco Intercompany Media Engine

• Cisco ISR G2 Video Conferencing Services

• Cisco WebEx

• Cisco TelePresence Systems

Mobility • Cisco Identity Services Engine

• Cisco WLAN Controller

• Cisco Mobility Services Engine

Security • Cisco ASA 5500 Adaptive Security Appliance

Management • Cisco Prime™ for Enterprise (Network Control System, LAN Management Solution, Collaboration Manager, Network Analysis Module)

• Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS)

• Cisco EnergyWise Orchestrator

Virtualization • Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™)

• Cisco Desktop Virtualization solution with VMware or Citrix

Transport • Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISR) Generation 2 routers with the packet voice-and-video digital signal processor 3 (PVDM3) support multipoint video conferencing for spontaneous and prescheduled video conferences. The router works in conjunction with Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express.



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Table 3Technical Components for Smart Workspace

Smart Work Center Services Cisco Products

Real-time communications • Cisco Unified IP Phone 8900 and 9900 Series, with large, backlit, vibrant, high-resolution, fully-adjustable color displays

• Cisco IP Video Phone E20

• Cisco TelePresence System EX Series

• Cisco Packet Voice Digital Signal Processor Module (PVDM) and Voice/WAN Interface Card (VWIC)

• Cisco ISR G2 Video Conferencing Services

• Cisco Active Collaboration Room

Mobility • co Aironet® 3500 Series Wireless Access Points with Cisco CleanAir Technology to automatically detect and adapt to interference

Security • Cisco ASA 5500 Adaptive Security Appliance

Management • Provided to individual Cisco Smart Work Centers as a service

Virtualization • Cisco VXC 2100 Series for Cisco Unified IP Phones 9951 and 9971

• Cisco VXC 2200 Series VDI Client

Transport • Cisco ISR G2 2900



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As part of the Clinton Global Initiative commitment and its Smart City strategy, the city of Amsterdam is harnessing IT to reduce the city’s ecological footprint, nurture a competitive workforce, attract new businesses, and improve residents’ work-life balance.

In 2008, the city of Amsterdam and Cisco collaborated with ecosystem partners such as ABN AMRO, Almere Knowledge City, Amsterdam Smart City, and local entrepreneurs to build a Smart Work Center proof of concept in the city of Almere. This center, the first in a planned network of Cisco Smart Work Centers, included facility management services, ICT services, and professional services such as catering, ATM, and child care.

From the first day of operation, the Smart Work Center experienced a 100 percent occupancy rate. Workers reduced their commutes significantly and stated that they enjoyed more opportunities for social and business interaction compared to working from home or at the office.

In 2009, the city of Amsterdam funded a chain of Cisco Smart Work Centers branded the “Double U Smart Work Network.” The centers connect over a citywide ultra-high-speed broadband network. The local authority’s offices and local businesses also connect to the network, increasing the city’s return on investment from the fiber network.

Today, the Netherlands’ network of Cisco Smart Work Centers includes more than 100 sites operated by more than 30 member organizations, including entrepreneurs. The centers share centralized services such as an accounting system, web-based office reservation tool, and an augmented reality application for smartphones to find the nearest Smart Work Center.

Both the proof of concept and Double U Smart Work Network are scalable frameworks capable of supporting other worldwide strategic initiatives. Ongoing projects include the region of Wallonia, Belgium; cities and regions in France; the city of London, U.K.; the cities of Madrid and Zaragoza, Spain; and South Korea.

Smart Work Center Concept in Action: City of Amsterdam



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For More InformationTo learn more about Cisco Smart Work Centers, visit: http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/smart_connected_communities.html

To discuss how your city might implement a network of Cisco Smart Work Centers, contact your local Cisco Account Manager or authorized Cisco partner.

Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.

Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership

relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1005R)

Americas Headquarters Cisco Systems, Inc. San Jose, CA

Asia Pacific Headquarters Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd. Singapore

Europe Headquarters Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/smart_connected_communities.html

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Solution Overview Cisco Smart Work Centers: Foster Urban ... · space and business services, the employees’ experience, and the collaborative experience with people throughout the