Best Practices: 10 Steps To Telecommuter Support
Beyond VPNs: 10 Steps To Telecommuter Support
Telecommuting has evolved from an occasionally used convenience for busy professionals extending their workdays, or a contingency for when the weather thwarts commuting plans, into a sanctioned, permanent work arrangement amounting to “a branch office of one.” For companies, outsourcing the physical workplace to employees—in effect, moving them from expensive corporate headquarters sites to their spare bedrooms—can yield significant savings in real estate and facilities costs, while eliminating expensive, time-sapping commutes.
Telecommuting isn’t just an option for a few job niches, either. In most enterprises, at least half of all employees could work from home: Our March 2009 InformationWeek Analytics Application Delivery Survey found that almost half of respondents were already serving applications to teleworkers, while the July 2008 Federal Mobility 2.0 study reported that more than 1.25 million federal employees were eligible to telecommute out of a total federal workforce of about 2.75 million. Take out 750,000 postal workers, and it means over 60% of federal employees could conceivably telecommute.
That’s a lot of freed-up office space and unclogged roads. However, despite the green and time-saving benefits, ad hoc, uncoordinated telecommuting programs can easily cost more than they save and frustrate participants to the point that a putative benefit becomes a burden. The model imposes additional loads on IT as well, including the complexity of supporting physically distant users, the increased security risks from employee use of uncontrolled public networks, and the need to accelerate deployment of new collaboration and social networking technologies to facilitate geographically dispersed workgroups. Planning for telecommuters requires a focus on network security, remote client management and Internet-centric communications as well as policies that reflect and regulate a new work paradigm. This report lays out 10 steps to help you get there. (B1760910)
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
5 Blend Technology, Capability, Policy
5 Figure 1: Personal Equipment Connection to Company Resources
7 Technology Requirements
9 Figure 2: Current and Future Virtualized Desktop Environment
12 Figure 3: Deployment of Collaboration Technologies
14 Figure 4: Portable Device Security Control
15 Figure 5: Pareto’s Architecture
16 Support Tools and Management/Governance Policies
19 Here to Stay
About the Author
Kurt Marko is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran, pursuing his passion for communications after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, Kurt spent several years as a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and simulation developer.
Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in the laser printer R&D lab doing electrophotography development, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join HP’s nascent technical IT group. He spent 15 years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprisewide infrastructure projects at HP, including the Windows domain infrastructure, remote access service, Exchange e-mail infrastructure and managed Web services.
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