Uh-oh… corporate IT is here :)
On balancing flexibility and policy in the new office
Quartz is moving to a new office in New York. We’re documenting it here because many of our questions apply to other startups. Our introduction explains more about what we’re up to. Follow our publication for updates.
Hi there!
My name is Drew, and I don’t actually work at Quartz. I’m the director of technology for all of Atlantic Media, which is Quartz’s parent company. That means I work across all of our brands, including Quartz, The Atlantic, National Journal, Government Executive, Defense One, and more.
In this capacity it’s my job to oversee major tech projects, including what kind of tech we roll out in Quartz’s new office. Which means I’ve got a tricky balancing act. How do I help Quartz deck out their new Quartzy space with cutting-edge and flexible technology while also keeping them compatible and in-line with company standards and policies?
The answer, I’ve found, is to ask actual Quartz employees tons of questions. During the course of the planning phase, I’ve had architects and space planners and electricians and audiovisual specialists ask me what I’d like to do in this space. But I keep telling them that I’m not the one who’ll actually be occupying the office. We need to talk to the people who will actually be working in this space! Not to ask them, “What kind of tech should we put in here?” but to ask, “What do you want to do with your space?” The answer to that question drives everything else.
During the course of planning, Zach and his team have identified several key items that we have to nail in this new office:
- strong and stable WiFi
- simple and reliable video conferencing
- flexible display options for monitors throughout the space
WiFi is tough in Manhattan. It’s not just a matter of providing a strong signal, it’s being able to cut through the clutter of 40 other poorly configured wireless routers blasting out their network signal in the surrounding buildings. Fortunately, the new office space is in a moderately less dense area of the city. That, plus the fact that we’ve got a great WiFi product in Aerohive means we should be A-OK on WiFi.
Videoconferencing has similarly been a challenge in Quartz’s current office. Seeing as it was a short term sublease, it wasn’t financially sound to put in a major business class videoconferencing system. We tried to hack together solutions via a combination of conference calls, Google Hangouts, and a startup called Highfive that provides a really cool plug-and-play videoconferencing solution for a flat $799 hardware purchase.
We had trouble making these work well together, however, and that’s why we decided to go a little bigger when we moved to 675 Avenue of the Americas. Right now the plan is to merge two well-known and reliable solutions to create our videoconferencing monster: Polycom and BlueJeans. We’ll be choosing one conference room location at 675 AOA to build in a true, business-class video conferencing system. And then we’ll use BlueJeans’ legendary integration capabilities to allow conferences between that room and up to 99 other individual endpoints.
The final piece of the tech puzzle was the displays that we’ll have mounted throughout the space. When we asked what Quartz’s priorities for these displays was, we were told that the goal is to maximize flexibility. One day they might want CNN up to monitor breaking news, the next they’d like to display stats from Atlas, but later that day flip to the ESPN app to keep track of March Madness.
But if there’s one thing that corporate audiovisual solutions are bad at, it’s flexibility. You can get incredibly robust (read: expensive) solutions that will absolutely blow you out of the water in accomplishing the individual task you give it, but it’s hard finding any one solution that can accomplish multiple goals. So we’re going consumer-grade. The plans for these televisions is nothing more complicated than multiple HDMI ports. We’ll equip the televisions with commercially available video products like Chromecasts, Apple TVs, even a Raspberry Pi or two and then turn loose the legendary tech minds at Quartz to locate, buy, or build whatever software solution necessary to complete the mission.
In the end, I’m doing my very best to provide the base platform and then get out of the way. Corporate IT can sometimes hurt more than they help when it comes to an agile and creative company like Quartz. In the end, all they really need is a reliable connection to the Internet and a license to be makers. The less they have to deal with the corporate director of technology, the better!
