About a month ago, CHS opened a new office in Lowertown, St. Paul. It was a new kind of office for us. We did it for a variety of reasons. One of the more interesting drivers was our desire to experiment. You can read all about the overall vision in my previous article on the subject. If you missed it, give it a quick read first, then continue on here. I’d like to use this article to dive into an element of our experiment that has some interesting implications.

The network carrier

This story starts about a week after we moved into our space. Because my blog, pictures published on LinkedIn, and word-of-mouth, talk of Lowertown continues to be one of the top topics of conversations with colleagues in the industry. Everyone wants to hear more and pick my brain a bit.

I was having my regularly scheduled meeting with our network carrier. We were talking about our usual business, and my account manager mentioned that he noticed that we opened a new office in Lowertown. He had a concerned look on his face, because we hadn’t ordered any network circuits for the office.

I explained that we decided that we didn’t need our standard MPLS circuits for this site. He nodded a bit, and then continued, “I supposed you must be doing SD-WAN over the local ISP.” I answered, “Yeah, we thought about that, but decided we didn’t need that either.”

Following along, he dove a bit deeper, and we discussed the Local Area Network. I explained, “Yep, we talked it over and decided we didn’t need a LAN.”

The network that doesn’t exist

No corporate LAN? No corporate WAN? By now you must be thinking that all we do is type on typewriters at CHS. We do, in fact, develop software and engineer systems in this office. So, how do we do it? In a word: virtually.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology has been around for a long time. I started using it regularly about 18 years ago when home broadband internet started to become widely available. Prior to that, every corporation used Dial-Up Networking for remote access.

VPN isn’t new, but for most of the last 18 years, VPN has provided a pretty lousy end-user experience. Technically, it worked, but I always thought of it as supplemental to my primary connectivity. CHS invested in great VPN technology that is always-on and transparent to the end-user. It was a win in both the security and productivity columns, which is hard to achieve.

A building with a network

When we contracted our space in Lowertown, it came with coffee, electricity, wireless LAN, and internet included. We could bring our own, but that would have costed us extra. I’ll gladly pay for infrastructure if I need it, but we really scratched our heads trying to come up with a compelling reason why.

What’s on a LAN anymore anyway?

Historically, remote offices had a lot of local servers. We don’t have any in this office. It’s all in the cloud or our data centers.  Typically, offices have phone systems. Our phone system is software. We had a little trouble getting our interactive smart whiteboards to connect to the cloud without the private network, but our smart folks eventually figured out a secure way to set that up too.

We discovered that there is just about nothing locally in the office that anyone needs to access. It’s all in the cloud. Even if one end-user interacts with another end-user three feet away, it’s all going up to the cloud and back whether there is a traditional LAN or not.

Ultimately, we decided there was no reason to create the corporate network in this office. We took advantage of the commodity services provided and used our advanced security tools to secure our communications and our devices.

The mind-bending irony

I spend a good chunk of my career as a network engineer. I was a card-carrying CCNA until it expired many moons ago. I know how this stuff is supposed to work. You call the carrier for a circuit. Then you setup the switches for the LAN, the router for the WAN, and the firewalls for the security boundaries. It’s standard-issue design, but we threw it all out the window.

What does this all mean?

CHS is a really big company with hundreds of remote locations. I am not saying that what I’ve described here is our new standard. It’s not. Not all offices are created equal, and we always need to think carefully about the best approach. This is Lowertown. It’s a place to try something completely different and see if it works.

It’s a living experiment in more ways than one. I thought I’d use this article to showcase one of those ways. Where this approach goes from here has yet to be determined. In six months we might decide that this was the worst idea ever, and that’s okay.

The leadership lesson

This article was a tad more technical than what I typically write. Here’s the lesson: I think it’s easier to see opportunities for innovation as an outsider than as an insider.

We can look at others and criticize their methods as antiquated or outdated, but what about our own stuff? I think that’s harder to challenge. I know it is for me. We all have expertise, education, and years of experience telling us the right way to doing things. Those practices evolve yet we cling to tradition. Yes, we do this even in technology.

I like this example because it’s squarely in my own backyard of expertise, education, and experience. This is the area where I’m vulnerable. I never thought I’d open a new corporate office and not bother to install a single switch, router, firewall, or access point. In what ways can you stretch your thinking in a similar way?