Should your IT staff telework?
Companies are split on whether it’s a good idea to let IT employees work from home.
By
Ann Bednarz
,
Network World
, 05/23/2008
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Being available to troubleshoot tech problems remotely, at all hours of the night and on weekends, goes with the territory
for IT pros. But working from home during business hours? Not so much. There are signs, however, that attitudes could be changing.
CIOs polled late last year by Robert Half Technology indicate telecommuting by IT staff members is gaining ground in some companies. Asked if their IT workforce is telecommuting at a higher rate than five years ago, 21% said they have
more telecommuters now, 23% said it’s the same proportion, and only 3% said fewer IT employees are telecommuting. Just over half (51%) of the 1,400 respondents said they don’t offer telecommuting to IT staff.
The impetus for IT workers to work from home is likely no different from what’s driving any other profession to consider telework:
Sky-high gas prices, traffic congestion, a desire to be environmentally friendly, business continuity, commercial real estate savings, and the appeal of flexible work arrangements, to name a few of the drivers.
“There are plenty of good reasons to telework, but right now I think that the big mover is gasoline prices,” says Chuck Wilsker,
president and CEO of the Telework Coalition, an organization in Washington, D.C., that promotes telework through education and legislative efforts.
In addition, remote-access technologies have matured a lot over the last several years, making it possible to troubleshoot IT problems in the middle of the night
without scrambling to the data center.
“As recently as five years ago, your beeper would go off, you’d have to wake up, leave home, hike it to the office and do
something. That doesn’t really happen anymore,” says Jasmine Noel, a partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates. With today’s browser-based
systems management tools, “you can get most, if not all, of same functionality that you would get if you were physically in
the office,” Noel says.
Logging on from home
IT workers can use technologies like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Secure Shell (SSH) and terminal servers to interact with
servers and desktops. Out-of-band equipment and secure remote-access appliances let them access hardware-level controls when
the network is down, says Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates.
Those same tools could facilitate working from home full-time, if companies are open to the idea.
“Certainly some companies will push back on this remote access, because they don’t have the technology or procedures in place,
because managers are unable to adapt, or maybe their staffs are not right for telecommuting,” Mann says. “But I am seeing
progressive IT organizations -- including some of the largest finance corporations in the world -- already managing their
server environments remotely. Their system administrators are set up with multiple consoles, VPN and remote access protocols
in a home office on the other side of the country.”
One strategic driver is the ability to recruit IT talent from all parts of the world. “This is a very real opportunity for
enterprises to attract the very best talent, provide high value administration and reduce costs,” Mann says.
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Comments (2)
Excellent articleBy Anonymous on May 23, 2008, 11:38 amWow - this article covered the full gammut of telecommuting issues - network security, productivity, etc. Very thorough. I myself have spent my career in IT and...
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Work Life BalanceBy Anonymous on May 23, 2008, 11:06 pmLast year I did a lot of work from home, checking email late at night and chatting early in the morning. As a result, I was frequently late into the office and...
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