Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on continuity-of-operations planning. Read the second part of the COOP series.
Thomas Barrett, deputy secretary of the Transportation Department, encapsulates the human dimension of continuity-of-operations planning in simple terms: “We have to be able to do our job under any circumstances.”
On a tactical level, making sure that employees get their day-to-day work done in a crisis situation is a significant human capital issue. On a larger level, it’s a question of whether a government agency can marshal the collective productivity to deliver its mission-critical services, whatever the crisis scenario might be — a terrorist attack on its building, a major fire in its headquarters or a flu epidemic that keeps workers at home.
For the most part, this means creating the capability for employees to work from home or other remote locations and having an information technology infrastructure that is robust enough to support remote access to vital agency computer systems.
In April, DOT officials decided to test the agency’s ability to keep its operations going and deliver services if something happened to its new headquarters building and employees had to work away from the main office. Officials scheduled the test to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to nearby Nationals Park baseball stadium, a day they knew the area around their building would be congested with traffic, and Washington’s Metro subway system would be packed with riders.
At the time, about 22 percent of the department’s employees were teleworking at least one day a month, Barrett told the Telework Exchange’s town hall meeting a week after the COOP demonstration. So some of the groundwork was already laid for the exercise.
The experiment, the largest department-level COOP demonstration in government to date, proved to be something of a watershed moment for COOP. It worked, and it worked well.
At one point during the day, more than 60 percent of DOT’s 5,400 headquarters employees were logged on to the department’s network from home or remote sites. The employees used encrypted, government-issued laptop PCs and accessed a secure, encrypted network connection.
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