As gas prices rise (and how) and the simple fact that technology exists to support working from home it starts to dawn on govies that they too can work from home.
From GCN:
In the summer of 2004, the General Services Administration’s regional center in Boston was closed for nearly a week. GSA officials couldn’t blame the shutdown on anthrax, bird flu or terrorists.
They had no one to blame but Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).
The Democratic National Convention was held in the building next door, and the Secret Service had declared the convention a national security event. Every federal employee who worked at the center was required to work somewhere else that week.
Fortunately, the GSA center had been developing a telework plan since 1999. The Desktop 2000 plan is centered on a virtual connection from Citrix Systems. With Citrix MetaFrame installed in the office’s data center, GSA employees can launch applications via the Web. Every user — at every level — is issued a laptop PC.
Now, why can’t more businesses see the light? One of the things that I continue to run into is management types that are hard set on the 80’s mentality of wanting to see “butts in seats”. This is a notion that for all intents and purposes is a relic of days past. Sure there are times when people have to meet in person, no argument there. But, there is a lot of times that you just don’t have to be physically in the office.
Let’s take into account the morning commute. For me, I drive 45 minutes to work in the morning (on a good day). Thankfully, I have a boss who is enlightened and allows me to work remotely on occasion. But, that 1.5 hours per day could be better used. I know of folks like that have double that as a part of their daily commute.
But there is a wrinkle (isn’t there always?). With more and more teleworkers moving into the home office and companies realizing the financial benefits I wonder. Are they taking the time to secure these teleworkers appropriately? There is a worry that companies will take a lackadaisical approach to teleworkers thinking that since they VPN in that they are beyond the perimeter and therefore not a corporate concern. Not so. This is an extension of the perimeter and should be treated as such. Sure they can be labeled untrusted but, if they are dedicated resources then by definition they are part of the enterprise.
Telework can cut rush-hour traffic congestion in major cities. It can improve workers’ morale. It can help the environment. But perhaps one of the best arguments for telework is that — as GSA found — it is essential for continuity-of-operations planning.
“Back then, we were just talking about working off-site,†LeVerso said of Desktop 2000. “The heart and soul of the solution revolved around the concept of teleworking and had no real bearing on our fledgling COOP program at that time.â€
Yet the ability to work remotely became the cornerstone of the center’s disaster response plan. “We learned very early on that COOP is telework,†LeVerso said.
More “old school” management types can learn from this.
[tags]Teleworkers, Remote Access, VPN, Remote Worker, Virtual Office[/tags]
Excellent points in your piece. Business continuity is an ongoing driver for telework/virtual workers, but significant time and effort need to be spent to ensure operational considerations are factored into the transition. These range for IT readiness (equipment, support, security, data backup, remote access, etc) to operational (facilities, telework centers, virtual cubicles, etc) and organizational issues (employee assessments, collaboration, managerial readiness, etc.). The Commonwealth of Virginia has promoted a relatively new initiative supported by Gov Kaine, yet deployment has been slow due to a lack of judicious and thoughful examination of barriers to adoption.
Best,
Mark