The Mobile Office Goes Global

For Charles B. Warden Jr., global business operations run on a BlackBerry smartphone and two Macs. And he’s not alone. One of his partners has a BlackBerry, a Mac and a backup PC. The other members of The Stanton Group — including four in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut and several in the Washington, D.C., area — also have BlackBerry smartphones and one or more PCs.The Stanton Group has no central facilities, or shared water cooler. There is no Stanton Group infrastructure or information technology staff. The company’s core team of five and its handful of consultants interact via phone, text messages and e-mail services provided by a large commercial Internet service provider. On any given day, Warden and his colleagues may be working from their homes, a nearby Starbucks or hotel rooms in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Gambia or the Korean peninsula — all locations where The Stanton Group has worked with both government and industry to develop energy and infrastructure projects.Welcome to the global mobile office.“Each of us really only needs a couple of devices to succeed,” says Warden.As project developers, much of the work The Stanton Group does involves proposals, presentations and contract development. Word documents and PowerPoint presentations are easy to attach to e-mail messages and to send to team members.