Telework Exchange

When Telework Exchange held its 2010 Spring Town Hall Meeting on April 8 in Washington, D.C., it had been a full two months since "Snowmaggeddon" had wreaked havoc on the national capital region. However, the high-profile role that teleworkers effectively played in keeping their part of the Federal government operating during the unprecedented snowstorm permeated the discussion of five expert panels, even as they touched on the key issues currently confronting telework programs, including technology, managing a remote workforce, and enabling business continuity.

Telework's advance in popularity, acceptance, and relevance as a productive work arrangement ensured a large turnout for the Spring Town Hall Meeting. Telework Exchange Executive Director, Stephen W.T. O'Keeffe, noted in his introductory remarks that the event ranks as the largest ever, with more than 150 agencies represented.

The Spring 2010 Town Hall Meeting consisted of two tracks, one focused on technology issues and the other on management considerations. A joint session on telework's role in enabling business continuity closed the agenda.

Track 1 – This Matter of Technology

In the "Technology Matters" track, panelists discussed the current and future state of telework solutions, providing best practices for setup, security, technical support, and increasing capacity.

Today's Technology

Pamela Budda, Policy Program Manager for Work/Life Programs within the Civilian Personnel Management Service at the Department of Defense, moderated Session 1, "Making the Most of Existing Technology."

She first called on Jeff Porter, Director of the Platform Technology Division for Fairfax County, Virginia, asking him to describe the strategic goals of his organization's telework policy and the technology solution that supports it. Tasked with handling the IT and telework requirements of 55 agencies representing a range of missions, Porter said that he and his team have set out to create as much self-service capability, agility, and online collaboration as possible.

Telework, he explained, is just one subset of the County's far-reaching remote access program. "What we have in Fairfax County is what we call a government without clocks, walls, or boundaries, and that means employees have the option to access work information 24/7 as their particular work assignment requires," Porter explained. "Anywhere employees go, they should be able to get to the systems and do their work remotely."

The solution the Fairfax County team built leverages the latest industry standards, relying on 70 servers and a virtual private network (VPN) to provide 274 applications to remote workers.

Security was one of the biggest challenges, Porter noted, because many County organizations handle confidential medical records and personal citizen information. This fact required answering the question upfront as to what data teleworkers could access and whether they should be allowed to print documents at home. Another concern is capacity. The solution easily handles the requirements of about 1,500 teleworkers daily, but at times demand can swell to more than 3,000 workers. The IT team will be stressing the system even further in the near future when they begin providing streaming video applications to teleworkers, an approach that is intended to save the County in licensing fees.

Lt. Col. Ronald Robertson, Deputy Chief of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Information Systems Center, outlined the reasons telework has become so important to DISA.

He explained the agency is relying heavily on the work arrangement to retain its highly scientific workforce when it moves its Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence/Information Technology (C4IT) operations to a unified headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. Telework also is seen as key to DISA's efforts to attract some of the best and brightest members of the next generation workforce.

In embracing telework, DISA has discovered several best practices that Robertson shared. A critical but often overlooked consideration is to ensure whatever telework solution is deployed, that it be user-friendly and relatively simple to engage. Robertson said focusing on the interface and functionality at the outset not only makes telework more accessible for employees, but it makes the training and support requirement easier for all over time.

"We like for (our teleworkers) to be able to work at home or work anywhere and have it be as if they are working from the office, so they have access to the files or applications based upon their security level and the work that they are doing," Robertson said.

Another lesson that DISA has taken to heart is the need to conduct telework exercises, not just to make sure the system works in the event of a Continuity of Operations (COOP) event, but also to locate and fix bugs as they arise.

"If you want to be successful, you have to conduct rehearsals and force people to telework," Robertson explained. "Make sure you spread out these exercises so you do not overwhelm your system or cause problems at the outset," he said.

In fact, taking a deliberate approach has helped the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) evolve its telework program into one of the most successful in the Federal government, according to Rod Turk, Director of Organizational Policy and Governance in the Office of the CIO. Currently, nearly 5,400 USPTO employees, or 82 percent of those eligible, are teleworking at least one day a week, and 2,347 employees, or 36 percent, regularly telework four days a week.

"From a project management standpoint, I think the key to success for any telework program is to treat it like a project," Turk stated. "You have to have the management and the employees understand this is what your organization needs to do. Then that strategic intent flows into the creation of a budget line. You create a project manager…and coordinate the other activities into that project, to include training, program refinement, pilots, selection of tools, procurement of infrastructure, security, technical support, and last but not least, communications."

Turk noted that the USPTO, which has a strong office hoteling strategy, provides teleworkers who work primarily at home with a suite of technology tools for their exclusive use. These include a laptop, printer, two 21-inch monitors, a docking station, keyboard, mouse, Web cam, router, and headset. For security purposes, the telework setup includes full-disk encryption on the laptop, a VPN connection back to the USPTO network, and two-factor authentication.

And, Turk added, all USPTO employees are mandated to go through telework training and security awareness training before they are allowed to telework.

"It's interesting that I, as the IT person, am up here doing the briefing for USPTO and not the program manager. The reason that is important is one of the keys to having a successful telework program is having the infrastructure to enable people to work remotely," Turk said. As agencies look at expanding their telework programs to more employees, cost, efficiency, and infrastructure capacity will be more challenging, according to Bill Blum, Director of Federal civilian sales for Citrix Systems. He educated the audience on desktop virtualization, a technology that separates the desktop computing environment from the physical machine.

For teleworkers, desktop virtualization will allow for more self-service, or the ability to pick the specific applications they need to do their jobs, rather than going home with a device loaded up with every possible application configuration. "All of this drives towards a more usage-based cost model," Blum explained.

For telework, desktop virtualization offers a number of benefits, Blum said. These include the same high performance no matter where the device is located, more flexibility, and reduced administrative time and costs related to IT administration and maintenance.

Tomorrow's Technology

Despite its benefits, telework still presents some cultural challenges for users, including less face time with colleagues and the pervasive myth that teleworkers are not always working or capable of performing all their work tasks at home, according to Steve Koenig, Director of the Consumer Electronics Association and the moderator of the session on "Integrating New Technology." He invited panelists to weigh in on how new and evolving technologies eventually will change the game for telework, including cloud computing, collaboration tools, and advances in security.

Wayne Leiss, Chief Information Officer for the Office of Thrift Supervision, Department of the Treasury, said his organization now is focused on enabling bank examiners to work collaboratively from a home office, an achievement that will reduce travel to visit bank customers by 10 percent. Another goal is to improve infrastructure and program capacity to the point that if an emergency occurs that requires an office shutdown, such as "Snowmageddon," employees will have the ability to continue working from home via telework or take leave.

"Much of what we do in our office is collaborative, so this type of telecommuting will require much more than just a notebook, the VPN, and the BlackBerry," Leiss said, noting that his office is in the process of replacing existing notebook computers with upgraded versions that boast a Webcam. "We want the technology to make the experience more like actually being together in the office."

Telepresence and the enabling technologies will be the way of the future, said Daud Yamin, Systems Engineering Manager of Collaboration at Cisco Systems, especially as the Millennial Generation becomes a more influential employee demographic within the Federal government. "The fact that they're going to be teleworking is implied," he said. "So it's a very different expectation and a very different way of doing work."

Yamin, who manages a team of Cisco engineers across 11 time zones, sees social networking playing a bigger role in telework collaboration but believes that the next big "earthshaking" technology will be video. "It's going to be really impossible to get away without having some sort of video connectivity point from you to a group or a person you are talking to," Yamin explained, adding that Cisco is even experimenting with 3-D video, or holographs.

Agencies have a long way to go to achieve this standard, however, said Darren Ash, Chief Information Officer and Deputy Executive Director for Corporate Management for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While his agency has seen "exponential" growth in its telework program, with 20 percent of employees now teleworking at least some of the time, there remain cultural, IT support, and broadband capability issues that need to be worked out.

In fact, one of the key enablers to greater telework at NRC was not a technology breakthrough, but the simple inclusion of a "new flex clause" in the most recent collective bargaining agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union. Ash explained that the deal essentially extended the official workday, so employees now are able to engage in work tasks as early as 5 a.m., as late as 11 p.m., and even on Saturday. "It's not a technology, but it is something that we've done as an organization to be able to support and enable telework," he noted.

New and better technology is something that the NRC is pursuing, but it will take time and a step-by-step approach, remarked Ash. "I think there's still a long way to go for us, particularly with the social media, the video," he said. "We know we've got the very strong capabilities, office to office, the high-definition type videoconferencing. But we are really lacking that at the individual level. I agree that would be a game-changer – having a team being able to look at each other in a videoconference, wherever they might be."

Leiss agreed with Ash's general assessment of the Federal technology environment, adding that the technology needed to enable teleworkers to work on projects alone had been successfully created and implemented. "As far as I'm concerned, that's a norm," he said. "It's when you talk about working collaboratively that the challenges exist for the future."