Planning for the flu season - and a possible pandemic

With October being the official kickoff of the annual flu season, some organizations are taking steps to prepare for a pandemic of the seasonal or avian flu by beefing up communications capabilities and planning for employees to work remotely.

While IT administrators might be inclined to look at preparing for a pandemic much as they would for any other disaster, pandemics are different in several ways, said Steve Bittinger, an analyst at Gartner.

First, pandemics occur over a much longer period of time -- weeks and months compared with the hours and days involved in a natural disaster or terrorist attack -- but this also provides weeks in which to prepare, Bittinger said. Second, they can have a severe impact on employees' attendance and customer purchases either because of sickness, fear of sickness or other limitations such as travel restrictions and quarantines, he said. Bittinger advises organizations to be prepared for absenteeism rates of more than 25% if a pandemic strikes.

Organizations are preparing for a potential pandemic in different ways. At Indian Health Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responsible for 1.8 million American Indians or Alaska Natives, the focus is on communicating with employees and tribal representatives, both sending information to them and getting information back, said Dean A. Ross, the agency's national emergency manager based in Rockville, Md.

The Indian Health Service operates in 345 hospitals and clinics and 85 emergency management services, Ross said. Since February, he has been using a Pandemic Management and Notification Service from SWN Communications Inc. in New York. The service, which costs about $10,000 a year to operate, based on 250 total representatives from 563 tribes, works from a Web browser and doesn't require any additional client software, which is why Ross chose it, he said.

With the software, Ross could send a telephone message to each tribe to not only warn it of a potential pandemic but also to gather information back from the tribes. For example, the software could ask each person called to punch "1" on the telephone keypad if he was ill, and then "1" again if anyone in his family was ill, Ross said. That would provide planning information for a spreadsheet or database about how the pandemic is spreading geographically and keep people from making uninformed decisions, he said.

For commercial real estate company The Cadillac Fairview in Toronto, the focus this flu season is primarily on how to enable its 1,600 employees to work from home, said Scot Adams, CIO of business innovation and technology services. Adams said his company recently began using MobiKey, a wireless service from Route1, also in Toronto, that allows end users use a Universal Serial Bus device for remote computing.

The product has two components, Adams said. The first component is the MobiKey itself -- a USB device that turns a home computer into a thin client. The other component is a wireless service brokered by Route1. While an end user is connected to his office PC through MobiKey, the computing, applications and data remain behind the corporate firewall. "If we needed to, we could quickly set up a telecommuting policy ... that's easy and affordable for us to turn on quickly," Adams said.

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