Security is one of the inconvenient topics that inevitably arises, sooner or later, when agencies start talking about telework.
Telework is a popular topic. The idea of letting employees work from home a few or most days each week has garnered increasing interest among government workers and managers for a number of good reasons.
Workers enjoy the reduction in commuting costs and time and appreciate the convenience and flexibility that may help them juggle family and work responsibilities. Agencies benefit from improved employee morale, the ability to relocate offices without losing part of their workforce, and reduced real estate costs.
Recognizing these and other advantages, the House approved last month H.R. 4106, which would require federal agencies to set policies that allow some workers to telework.
Although workers and agency executives might only see telework’s upside, security officers and experts know it also has a dark side. Whenever employees take data home or work on it outside an agency’s physical walls and network firewall, there is the potential for security leaks. The challenge is to figure out how to give home-based workers sufficient freedom to do their jobs without compromising data security and privacy.
Government telework pioneers, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, have been naturally cautious. The USPTO has 14 telework programs in which employees work from home as few as one day or less a week to almost the whole week. Nearly 4,000 USPTO workers and contractors are teleworking, representing about 85 percent of the telework-eligible workforce.
Significantly, about 1,400 of the office’s teleworkers are “hotelers,” having given up their permanent office space and instead reserving temporary desk space when they come in a few hours each week. All this has been great for the USPTO’s bottom line.
“We’re hiring additional workers each year,” said Danette Campbell, senior adviser for telework at USPTO. “Those hotelers let us do so without having to add to our real estate significantly.”
Because of the sensitivity of the proprietary data USPTO works with, Campbell has gone to great lengths to ensure that the dispersed workforce is as close to leak-proof as possible.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
