SIDEBAR: Remote Possibilities

by Ann Bednarz

IT staff should put themselves in teleworkers' shoes for a bit

To prepare for the role of Travis Bickle in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, Robert DeNiro famously drove a cab for a few weeks. It's not a bad idea for IT staff to similarly live the life of a remote worker for a while to see how technology behaves outside the corporate campus. Setting up a telecommuting lab is one way to do that, suggests analyst firm Forrester Research.

Creating a virtual or on-premise telecommuting lab can help IT better understand the daily experience and challenges of remote workers, according to Brownlee Thomas, a principal analyst at Forrester. "It will provide direct input for IT architects about the likely impact of new application deployments in a remote office environment, and it could help IT decide what applications might be put on servers that are outside the firewall without compromising security," Thomas writes in a 2004 research report.

Thomas suggests different lab scenarios for companies, depending on how many teleworkers and remote workers are involved. She recommends companies with more than 500 home-based remote workers and contractors create a permanent telecommuting lab that provides a place for training teleworkers and replicating remote access products and services. An ad hoc IT lab is probably sufficient for enterprises that don't plan to hire home-based remote workers in the near future but may want to train employees for regular part-time telecommuting.

If a company is just getting started with telecommuting, a virtual lab is an easy option to consider, according to Thomas. One way to set up a virtual telecommuting lab is to have IT staff outfit their own homes with the requisite technologies and provide IT support remotely, either on a full- or part-time basis. For example, an IT staffer could equip a home office with different types of Internet access - such as dial-up, cable, DSL, satellite and wireless access - to see how applications perform under different conditions.

Establishing a telecommuting lab is just one of the recommendations in the Forrester Research report, "A Clear Strategy Will Help IT Effectively Support Remote Workers".

In the report Thomas also recommends IT staff get together with folks from HR, finance and other departments to define a clear strategy for supporting different types of teleworkers; develop training products and services; and provide teleworkers with a hard-copy of a reference manual that includes information such as IT contacts and application tips.

On the training front, Thomas suggests scheduling time with remote workers before they begin working online from home. New remote workers should spend some time at the nearest corporate office and undergo the same boot-camp orientation program given to other new hires before they head home. Local office workers who are relocating to a home office should get an abbreviated training session that includes some time in a telecommuting lab environment, according to Thomas.

Basic PC maintenance training is also a must for remote workers. "Because a high portion of commonly experienced remote laptop problems can be attributed to the end users' failure to execute simple regular PC clean-up and maintenance tasks, some basic training will go a long way in avoiding help desk calls and lost productivity," Thomas writes.

For more tips from Forrester's companion research, "How to Write a Telecommuting Policy", see "Get It in Writing".