Tele-working and the art of Pan Flu preparedness.
The CDC predicts the 2009 flu season will be especially bad and the world health organization, earlier this year, declared a global pandemic. What is remarkable about this is that it occurred during June and not during the regular flu season. I have talked to several public health experts that say the 2009/2010 flu season is going to be one of the worst on record. What does that mean? The Libertarian Party card in my wallet says it means a boondoggle for beltway bandits to sell disaster planning software, my public health background says it is going to mean some very sick people this winter and the IT guy in me says we finally have a chance to make the case for Tele-working!
While I am currently at the Centers for Disease Control as an engineer designing and implementing their Citrix remote access strategy, I have worked in private industry. One of my employers, Apollo Group house several “cubicle farms” with numerous enrollment counselors, financial aide staff, etc. When I think about pan flu response strategy I cannot help but think that Tele-working goes hand-in-hand with it. What I think most companies need to do is try to tie revenue generation to a particular job title. In most of the private and public companies I have worked for, the IT staff was the only group that was adept at Tele-working. While that will be great to keep the systems up and running in a pan flu response, it will do little to generate revenue for the company as none of them enrolled students in classes (in the case of Apollo Group) or provided advice to stock holders (Charles Schwab). If 70% of your revenue is tied up with someone who answers a phone and uses three or four CRM/Financial applications and they do not Tele-work then you and your company had better be ready to live without that revenue in the event of an outbreak. As a former public health specialist, let me tell you, your cubicle farm is a Petri dish, a nasty flu, as your floor managers can likely attest, can wipe out a large chunk of your staff in a regular flu season. I would ask the following questions when preparing a pandemic response:
• Who really makes the money for this company? Who are the “bread-and-butter” personnel?
• What applications do they use? Are the portable? Can they be run remotely? Do I install applications on their personal computers or do we use something like Citrix where topology, security and performance will be much less of a concern?
• How adept is my bread-and-butter personnel at Tele-working? What kind of calls can I expect to my helpdesk? Do I send them home with cheap thin clients pre-configured to “Phone home” to a remote access solution?
• Do they use their phones and use software like EasyCall with Click-to-call or do you use a VOIP solution in parallel with your SSL VPN?
At the CDC, during the initial H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak we had a spike in Tele-working but not due to people going home to get away from the flu, but for first responders who were going into the field to support local County and State health departments. For the most part, the spike in Tele-working was a non-event. Each month at the CDC, nearly 9000 unique user ID’s access CITGO (CDC Information on The Go) and the agency’s embracing Tele-working has lead to a very large majority of the staff already skilled at working from a remote location. The idea of an agile workforce is not new as those in sales, sales engineering and consulting will tell you. But if you are a company that wants to be truly pan-flu ready, embracing Tele-work and Tele-commuting is, in my opinion, a key step in being prepared for a pandemic. If/When a pandemic hits, a very large portion of the CDC staff will be using a system that they are already familiar with. Over the last two years, through an evaluation of service desk calls, we have been able to fine-tune our environment so that less than 2% of the overall users have any issue at all with the platform. Many of our service desk calls (which are monitored daily in real-time) are requests for the URL or first-time users. The important thing about our pandemic response is that the people we need to use it are already familiar with it. How many of your employees can tell you, without looking, where the emergency exits are in your building? Likely not many, however with CITGO at the CDC, over 8700 users a month know the alternate way to get access to their email, applications and other IT related data weather they are sitting at their desk/office/cubicle or sitting at home. As we embraced remote access/Tele-working more and more applications were vetted to be secured and prepared to be securely delivered via remote access with Citrix. Isolation environments offered by AIE and Microsoft’s APP-V/Softgrid product have allowed us to collate applications on servers resulting in less silos and better yield per box. Remote Access and Tele-working have been the catalyst for getting these applications available and have greased the treads for our pandemic response.
The Morale, “Green” and employee retention benefits of Tele-working speak for themselves and frankly, you can Google it and get better experts than me to advise you on the remaining benefits of a mobile workforce. For those who need to do their jobs, either protecting the public’s health, or continuing to call leads and generate revenue, to be able to respond to a pandemic, they need to be familiar with with your remote access solution. If there is a pandemic and 70-80% of your user base is using the remote access solution for the first time, you will not be effective, your helpdesk will get overwhelmed and users will get frustrated waiting on the phone or not getting help.
The Pandemic Flu Response system at the Centers for Disease Control gave rise to the Tele -working system that makes up, depending on the day, the 2nd or 3rd largest campus in the entire agency. We support over 2700 people a day and we tie up just over one service desk technician per day. Our support ratio is over 1000 to 1 on most days and while we still have a lot of improvements, it has saved a considerable amount of money in fuel, lost productivity sitting in Atlanta’s traffic and allowed centers to leverage experts from around the globe. This is a case where the latent function has lead to a primary benefit. As Tele -working becomes more popular at the CDC, the dedicated public health specialists and researchers get the advantages of being more agile and more prepared for a pandemic outbreak.
Embrace tele-working, and embrace preparedness.
John M. Smith
Principal Engineer/Architect, Perot Systems
Centers for Disease Control Customer
John.smith@psgs.com
(770)488-8153
