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Telecommuting Backlash
coondoggie writes to tell us that advocates of the telecommute have stood up against recent finger pointing based on recent telecommuter screw ups. One of the more notable screw up was the recent loss of many veteran's personal information by a VA employee. From the article: "Despite years of growing acceptance, telework still has such detractors. 'The No. 1 challenge is cultural inertia. It's motivating the middle managers, teaching them a new way of doing work,' O'Keeffe says. 'It's the Luddite mentality that we need to change.'"
The problem here isn't telecommuting, it is bad security practices and these problems probably would have happened one way or another, whether it's over a SSH tunnel, VPN, or local on the lan.
"coondoggie writes to tell us that advocates of the telecommute have stood up against recent finger pointing based on recent telecommuter screw ups."
That wasn't a "telecommuting" problem. That was "taking work home". Something a lot of people do.
Telecommuting isn't the problem. Ineffective security policies are.
It's possible to set up secure connections between a telecommuter's computer and a secure server. Encrypted tunnels for VPN or something like that. Encrypt data on the laptop hard drive - if you even permit sensitive data to be stored there at all.
But until government and corporations are seriously committed to taking the measures necessary to keep private data secure, incidents like this will keep happening, whether it's due to a stolen telecommuting laptop or a server that gets broken into.
"The analyst whose laptop was stolen from his house was not a teleworker, just someone who took work home with him."
/., but everyone I know, even in the IT industry has to go and show some flesh at a physical location to get paid. I'd love to telecommute but to be honest, it's mostly impractical for most people who have to engage with humans to get their job done effectively.
On what grounds are you going to detract from telecommuting in that statement? Every worker I know a)has a latop and b)moves it around. I don't think any of us would call ourselves telecommuters in any sense of the word. The fact we take work home, on 'theivable' media isn't an argument against telecommuting, it's an argument for us not taking work home!
I know there are telecommuters on
The next question for me is, who is this backlash against?
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Interesting article. It pretty much notes what's being said here - good telework requires good policies, good enforcement, and good planning.
In my last job I telecommuted for a good 3-5 months until I left. The company had excellent policies and security. There wasn't a single reported incident of data theft from our division in the two-and-a-half years I was there. I was definitely more productive, and I was also better able to plan around illness, holidays, and emegencies.
It's all about good policy. A company without telecommuters is still insecure if it has a crap IT Risk policy.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Why cant these compaines use Term Server? it would then be a bit more on the secure side, at least that way you dont have dumb people taking their lap top home with personal data on it. I actually work as IT for a sub division of Bank of the West, we do not allow our users to have ANY borrower/customer data saved on their local machine. if they do they can be let go quicker then you can say "i didnt mean to save it on my desk top" some of the managers here can "telecommute" in. if they would let the loan processors here do that too, then we could close half of the office and save the company on rental costs energy costs and much much more. Plus not to mention the gas saved for the peopele that could work from home. I think with the gas the way it is, more companies should encourage their employees to stay at home.
I had a laptop stolen in a secured office building. Each floor required a badge, as did the lobby. A laptop at home is no more or less safe than a laptop at work. In fact, my house is probably harder to break in to than most office buildings.
This is not the fault of telecommuting, although tyranical bosses who hate telecommutors will blame telecommuting (so they can chain you to your cubicle and bark orders and breath down your neck), when the reality is... accountability in the IT/Network Security dept.
I telecommute from around the world and work directly off machines via SSH, so even if my laptop is stolen, nothing confidential or work-related can be compromised.
Of coarse, if you're IT/Network security policies allow telecommuters to actually work ON their own hd's, then that is your fault for having a flawed IT/Network security policy.
Either way, this is FUD for anti-telecommutism.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
One thing I personally feel is you don't develop a bond with your co-workers if you don't see them face to face. I'm a network engineer for a large fortune 500, I have a company laptop with VPN software that I can use to work from home if I want. Occasionally I do, especially if I need to watch a sick child but still want to get some work done. Otherwise I try to go into my office and be present for face to face meetings whenever possible. My direct boss lives and works 300 miles from my office and I rarely see him, maybe 6 times a year. We talk over the phone and email frequently but we don't have the kind of boss/employee relationship that I've had in the past. Very hard to feel comfortable working/trusting other people when they seem almost like strangers to you.
I don't see anyone asking the question: "what effect does telecommuting have on productivity?" I work in the R&D arm of a major multinational corporation and the projects I work on are highly collaborative. I can often accomplish more in 15-30 minutes of face-to-face conversation with a colleague than in an hour or more over the phone or video conference, even with fancy collaboration tools like Lotus Sametime and Microsoft NetMeeting.
What are the odds that the weekend he'd take a dump of the records of 26M veterans home would be the weekend he got robbed? Someone better get the FBI on this guy's ass because he's probably got a fat Swiss bank account waiting for him after he loses his job and does a little time in the pokey. What a great coincidence that the time he takes the motherload of personal information home is the time he is the victim of a little "smash and grab..."
There's no good reason why a laptop taken home needs to have private information about customers/patients/clients/etc. on it. The customer data can be kept on an enterprise database server that is less susceptible to theft or to being accessed from insecure networks. The telecommuting employees can access the data remotely via an encrypted VPN, or use Windows Terminal Services, VNC, SSH, or the like over the VPN.
The backlash against telecommuting is not just security related - it's cultural. How can an organization stay fresh and bring on new people who can learn from mentors and rapidly come up the learning curve if all the senior engineers are tucked up at home coding in their PJs? How will that organization build a culture, build commitment, build team spirit? There have to be some limits or a company will stagnate. security issues can easily be handled with better technology over time but I don't think the cultural ones are so easily dealt with.
Think twice before pushing telecommuting to your boss, people. If you can telecommute from the other side of town and do your job effectively, someone from India or China can do it frm the other side of the planet, and for a lot less money. If there's an easier way to mark your position with a flashing neon "OUTSOURCE ME!" sign, I haven't heard of it...
"Telecommuting" means working away from the normal office environment. This guy was a "teleworker." Sure, he isn't NORMALLY a teleworker (e.g. he usually works out of the office). But he took work home. He was telecommuting. There would have been little chance of this data being stolen had he not "telecommuted."
Telecommuting has drawbacks. The number one issue is that the home is not usually a good environment for work. This includes issues of safety and data security. Operations are at risk if you do not take sufficient precautions.
One interesting solution to this is thin client computing. I've experimented with Sun Ray thin clients that connect over a broadband connection back to a server. No data is stored on the thin client. All it really transmits is pixels and keyboard and mouse clicks (encrypted, too). That's the right way to approach this. Never store data away from the people paid to protect it (then make sure those people do a good job).
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
So those uppity geeks think they can sit at home on their tender pimpled asses and draw a paycheck ? Taking our sensitive data home ? Workin in pajamas ? We'll show 'em! We'll send our data and IP to the other side of the planet to folks we've never met, where our laws don't mean squat...and we'll save massive bucks to boot! Yep, that'll larn 'em...
</irony>
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
It's about walking around, in any circumstance, with megs of sensitive information on a portable device that isn't encrypted. Whether it's a desktop, laptop, USB device, external hard drive, PDA, cell phone or iPod. It's really about non-existent data security policies, data security audits of vendors handling sensitive customer and employee data and, above all, it's about no accountability in government or private industry for mishandling sensitive information.
When companies are liable for millions in damages for lost privacy act data, you'll see change bordering on a religious revival. Until then, it's just the masses whining.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
ORRR.... The problem is having a flawed Corporate Management who will not supply the IT/Network group with the proper resources (budget/training/personnel) to IMPLEMENT proper IT/Network Security policies.
Actually outsourcing of services is just the natural extension of telecommuting: stuff that can be done remotelly for $X hour by somebody a couple of miles away can just as easilly be done for $Y hour (were Y < X) by somebody thousands of miles away.
In other words, anything that can be done remotelly is just as suitable for telecommuting as it is for outsourcing, since in it's simplest form outsourcing is just having your workers telecommute from a far place.
The point here is that anything that does not require the worker to be physically onsite always or often will end up being outsourced and that the great telecommuting revolution that some still seem to expecting has already been overtaken by the even greater outsourcing revolution - forget about working from a paradisian island for western wages, at this point the best one can aim for is telecommuting a couple of days a week.
I've been told by many managers that they've tried it, and people just flat-out blow off work when they're home, and productivity drops.
I've had several jobs now where telecommuting wasn't allowed at all, by company policy.
Every once in a while I would have an "emergency," like a repair on the house, or a delivery of furniture, or whatever, and I would tell my boss that I would have to be at home, but that I would still be working. One time it was a Unix admin position, so it could be done from anywhere, especially since many of the servers were colocated or managed. Another time it was doing technical support for java deveopment teams for a major Swiss bank.
So you tell your boss that you can't be in the office anyway, so you'll do some work from home. Then, while you're home, kick ass. Get tons of stuff done. Most people in an office kick back and do the minimum amount of required work, so it isn't hard to show how productive you can be when working from home. Do it off and on, maybe when you're sick, maybe when you have a child emergency, whatever, but if you can come up with a legitimate excuse to be home, take it, and work your ass off.
A lot of times your manager will see that you're a very productive worker, and through some simple tactics you can work out a situation where you can increasingly avoid having to commute. I had an hour and a half train commute each way to the swiss bank gig, so it was worth doing some extra work to be able to sleep an extra hour and a half on occasion, and even if I worked an extra half hour at night, I was still done with work and home an hour earlier.