There's No Office Like Home

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Opper has spent the past 15 years consulting to industry groups about groupware and networked computing systems in her role as principal of Susanna Opper & Associates. Her husband served as a corporate-sales and IS executive at IBM, CBS, and American Express before founding his sole proprietorship, Systems Sales Support Co., where he coaches sales teams on how to use technology to cover their territories more effectively and improve customer service. In addition to operating "his" and "hers" businesses, the couple is embarking on a shared venture called the Shawenon Center. They hope to work with small companies--or small teams from larger ones--for two- to four-day off-site meetings. The centerpiece of the retreats will be computer-mediated sessions in which state-of-the-art meetingware will facilitate and support brainstorming about strategic business issues, new product directions, and the allocation of resources.

All rooms in the two-story open-plan house, except the bedrooms and baths, are linked together by Windows NT, which runs on a local area network. There is a LAN outlet behind the faux Colonial desk in the kitchen, another in a custom-made recessed box under the conference-room table, and one in each of their private offices. Because the neighborhood is still wired with copper phone lines, the couple has contained the LAN's wires in a conduit implanted in the floor so that "when new technology comes in, we won't have to pull the walls apart to upgrade," says Ryan. The same kind of foresight went into planning the electrical system: they wired in excess capacity in case they ever want to install, say, a generator. "It's frightening to have to specify all the rough wiring before you know what the house looks like," Opper admits.

At the top of an elegant staircase rising from the main entranceway, a glass door opens into their home-office suite: a 20-by-16-foot conference room flanked by a long counter filled with computer equipment on one side and the entrances to the couple's matching 10-by-10-foot private offices on the other. The heart of the house LAN is located in this room--it's a Compaq server running Lotus Notes groupware and its Web version, Lotus Domino. A seven-year-old "roll your own" 90 MHz Pentium PC the two had custom-built from components runs their accounting and graphics packages. Copies can be printed out on a five-year-old NEC Silentwriter printer or the venerable Canon copier--the first office machine Opper ever bought when she hung up her shingle as a consultant in 1983.

The couple's private offices command the best views of the meadows, woods, and small private pond on the property. In fact, Ryan keeps binoculars close at hand so that he can watch the deer and other wildlife below his windows when he wants a break from developing curricula, making telephone calls, or scanning his E-mail. Though the offices are identical in shape and size, each occupant has arranged the space according to his or her own taste. Ryan has a stuffed recliner and a television as well as a window-spanning Formica counter and a 133 MHz Pentium laptop. He estimates that he spends 75% of his time on the road these days, but the laptop, loaded with Lotus Notes, keeps him linked to his clients. "I'm a recovering mainframe man; I used to think PCs were toys," he says. "Susanna got me into groupware." He teaches his courses at his clients' sites and then monitors the clients' use of the Lotus Notes system on a daily basis, usually for 30 days afterwards. He can replicate their data over the phone line, analyze trends in their database use, and then post comments to a public-discussion database or send personal E-mails to a sales rep for individual coaching. "I can be sitting in my bathrobe and slippers delivering high-quality service--and no one is charged for travel time," he says.

To design her office, Opper turned to feng shui principles--the classic Chinese art of positioning physical environments (homes, burial sites, and gardens) according to auspicious spatial arrangements. One feng shui notion argues that a person working behind a desk should always face the door, to avoid being startled or overseen. So Opper positioned her desk in an "L," which gives her the flexibility to face either the window or the doorway separating her private office from the conference room.

Early on, Opper and Ryan considered installing a sliding door between their offices. Instead, they put their phone lines on an intercom. The same intercom is connected to the doorbell, so if they are in the middle of a working session, they can invite latecomers upstairs without breaking their stride.

Opper and Ryan have tried to think of everything. The only "shadows in paradise," they say, are things not amenable to individual solutions--like the telecommunications infrastructure in Berkshire country. The couple live too far away (eight miles) from Bell Atlantic's central office to get ISDN lines, and private T-1 lines, they feel, are too expensive. There is no cell-phone tower nearby, and the hills cut off most signals. Ryan believes that the solution will ultimately consist of going to satellite, since satellite-based direct TV signals are already available locally.

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