What if working at the office wasn’t an option? What if
teleworking was mandatory and implemented on a moment’s notice?
What if the local school district closed their schools due to
confirmed cases of swine flu and your employees are forced to stay
home and be absent from work for an extended period?
How would you maintain customer or constituent services if your
employees are not able to come to work or man the lines at your
call centers? How would you augment communications capabilities and
capacity during times of crisis when people need infor mation and
immediate help?
In the event of a pandemic or global disease outbreak, this is
exactly the scenario that most organizations and employees would be
facing. Enterprises
and public sector organizations would be wise to prepare, but where
do you start?
Equipping the office for daily communication is easy, but if you
don’t have a mobility strategy in place, it can be a complicated
process to make the switch to part- or full-time teleworking
What if working at the office wasn’t an option? What if
teleworking was mandatory and implemented on a moment’s notice?
What if the local school district closed their schools due to
confirmed cases of swine flu and your employees are forced to stay
home and be absent from work for an extended period?
How would you maintain customer or constituent services if your
employees are not able to come to work or man the lines at your
call centers? How would you augment communications capabilities and
capacity during times of crisis when people need infor mation and
immediate help?
In the event of a pandemic or global disease outbreak, this is
exactly the scenario that most organizations and employees would be
facing. Enterprises
and public sector organizations would be wise to prepare, but where
do you start?
Equipping the office for daily communication is easy, but if you
don’t have a mobility strategy in place, it can be a complicated
process to make the switch to part- or full-time teleworking for an
organization. In this day and age of corporate mobility, Nortel has
redefined how people work, whether it is in or away from the
office. Nortel can help you implement this mobility strategy
whether you are moving into a new building or are simply upgrading
your existing phone system to IP. There are a number of options
available to organizations that give them targeted approaches to
help make their employees more productive and to continue providing
the products, services and critical information that their
customers or constituents rely upon every
day or in times of crisis.
Pandemics, swine and avian flu
A pandemic is
a global disease outbreak. A flu pandemic occurs when a new
influenza virus emerges for which people have little or no
immunity, and for which there is no vaccine. The disease spreads
easily from person to person, causes serious illness, and can sweep
across the country and around the world in a very short time. It is
difficult to predict when the next influenza pandemic will occur or
how severe it will be; wherever and whenever a pandemic starts,
everyone around the world is at risk. the next influenza pandemic
will occur or how severe it will be; wherever and
Health professionals are particularly concerned about outbreaks of
the Swine Influenza A H1N1 (often called Swine Flu) and Avian H5N1
virus (often called Bird Flu). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have
determined that these influenza viruses are very contagious and are
spreading from human to human.
The business impacts and challenges
A
pandemic can be sporadic in its outbreaks, each of which can last
for six to eight weeks. An especially severe pandemic could result
in significant
economic loss; businesses would be disrupted because so many people
in so many places become seriously ill at the same time. Impacts
can be varied based on the size of the enterprise and nature of its
operation.
In 2008, the World Bank released a study “Evaluating the Economic
Consequences of Avian Influenza”, which suggested that another
global flu
epidemic could generate economic loss on the order of $2 trillion
in a moderately severe pandemic and more than $3 trillion in a
severe scenario and could kill 71 million people worldwide. And
according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a
severe bird flu pandemic would make 30 percent of the population,
or 90 million people, ill and result in 2 million deaths. Companies
would have absentee rates of about 40 percent.
In the earlier stages of the swine flu outbreak in the U.S., the
U.S. Education Department said an estimated 533 schools enrolling
about 330,000 children had closed across the country, sending not
only children home for at least a week, but impacting their
parents’ work schedules and productivity of the businesses they
work for.
It is not too late to act and be prepared to mitigate the impact of
a flu outbreak to your organization.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has prepared a
Business Pandemic Influenza Planning Check List to help
organizations navigate the
complexities of plan preparations. The check list also prescribes
the need to enhance communications and information technology
infrastructures as
needed to support employee telecommuting and remote customer and
constituent access. This is where Nortel can help your
organization.
Action plan for workforce and business continuity
planning
So what does enhancing communications and
information technology infrastructures mean to your organization in
terms of pandemic preparedness?
It means preparing your organizations with an action plan in the
following three critical areas.
1. Maintaining employee productivity when they can’t work from
the office
Pandemic preparations will mean implementing guidelines to reduce
the frequency and type of face-to-face meetings that can spread
germs through hand shakes, sharing office supplies and physical
interaction among employees and Nortel-on-Nortel
In severe cases, employees can be asked to not come into the office
to keep employees from spreading the flu to each other. Employees
therefore need a reliable way to communicate and collaborate if
they cannot do so from their office. They require comparable
communications capabilities, access to business applications and
information as if they were physically in their office from
anywhere, anyway and anytime.
Furthermore, organizations must adopt a simple and practical
approach to keep communications secure and information private for
your remote workers while they work away from the office from any
personal computer.
Action plan
Establish secure remote
communications with sufficient capacity and capability. When
connecting from home or away from the office, it is imperative to
have secure remote access to the corporate network to access
communications, applications and corporate information. With secure
access to services and applications from anywhere, you can be as
present and productive in the ever-changing “virtual workplace”
as you would be in the main office. Robust options are available
from Nortel for a multitude of needs, from simple Nortel Virtual
Private Network (VPN) access to full-blown unified
communications, accessible over corporate-issued PCs. Emergency
Remote Access (ERA) licenses supported by Nortel VPN Gateways
provide a simple, low-cost solution to unpredictable increases in
demand for secure remote access — the exact scenario businesses
would see in a pandemic that required employees to work from
home.
For employees needing secure remote access but who are using their
own personal computer or non-trusted public computers, the Nortel
Secure Portable Office (SPO) provides a quick and simple approach
to assign and enable employees with secure remote access to their
corporate IT environment.
Enable workforce communications and collaboration with
Nortel
Unified Communications, which removes the barriers between voice,
email, conferencing, video and instant messaging — allowing
employees to
connect, communicate and collaborate from multiple locations with
multiple devices. Unified communications extends voice capabilities
in a multi-model fashion to combine voice, IM, presence and
interworking with multiple applications and back-office
solutions.
Streamline employee non-realtime communications with
Nortel
Unified Messaging which combines voicemail,
fax and e-mail into a single location that can be accessed from
anywhere, whether over the Internet or
by telephone.
1. Enable your workforce to establish ad-hoc or planned meetings
with Nortel Multimedia Conferencing, a reservation-less audio and
video confer-
encing system that is installed and operated in-house providing
conferencing service accessible from any device including SIP, IP,
analog, digital, PC
clients and mobile phones.
2. Supporting group meetings when employees cannot travel Pandemic
preparations will mean a curtailing of travel to affected
geographic areas and avoiding using transportation mediums such as
airplanes, trains and urban transit to get there to minimize the
human-to-human contact. However, for
enterprises and public sector organizations, key essential services
and business operations still require group meetings.
For these individuals, they need a means to communicate and
collaborate as a group to exchange real-time information and
coordinate their actions. This too can be particularly pronounced
in public sector roles where collective individuals across
organizations spanning geographical areas need to coordinate their
crisis management efforts with the utmost clarity and up-to-date
information.
Action plan
Leverage the use of audio and
video conferencing to tie together geographically separate venues
and workgroups. For special applications, extend endpoints to field
locations such as field staging areas, emergency operations
centers, incident response centers, key health clinics and mobile
command
posts. For ease of use and to maximize technology capabilities,
adopt standards-based IP-enabled Nortel Telepresence solutions.
Select the right endpoint systems to meet the needs of the
organization, from single user executive desktop systems,
group-oriented medium-sized room-based systems
and large conference room configurations with immersive
high-definition capabilities.
Simplify the task of managing video conferences by adopting Nortel
Managed Telepresence Service
— an innovative room-based telepresence, desktop, traditional
room-based video system, video bridging, gateway and other network
devices that allow
seamless integration of various network alternatives; and support
services removing the complexities and simplifying the management
of new and
existing video conference environments and reservations.
Address growing customer and citizen service needs during
times of crisis
When a crisis escalates,
organizations will see their customers’ heightened urgency for
goods or services or for citizens’ need to get public service or
crisis information or make requests for help.
If that demand is not anticipated, these calls could quickly flood
and overwhelm an organization’s phone lines, leading to longer
answer times and greater call backlogs. Compounding this, the
organization’s own call center staff may be impacted with greater
absenteeism levels from the flu outbreak with many agents choosing
to stay at home to avoid being infected or to take care of family
members that have been afflicted with the flu. Organizations must
implement strategies to quickly address this higher call demand,
allow employees/agents to access and work remotely from the call
center, offer extended hours and integrate productivity improving
technologies like self-service interactive voice response (IVR) to
efficiently respond to
the growing call traffic.
Action plan
Augment customer contact center
capacity and capability for government and enterprise call centers
as key touch points for citizens and customers
respectively. Nortel Contact Center and Self Service solutions help
you keep these centers running during a crisis or disasters, help
prepare the
centers to handle huge traffic spikes during these times and help
enable agents to continue to deliver services through the center
even though they
cannot be physically in the center.
Establish specialized telephone hotlines to offer employees or
citizens centralized numbers to call for pandemic-related inquiries
augmented with self-service IVR to off-load call responses that can
be automated and extend hours of operation for callers. For
assistance on responding to complex issues, leverage Nortel Unified
Communications to allow call center agents to quickly determine
availability of subject matter experts in the
organization and quickly contact that individual to provide
assistance to an inquiry to speed completion and maximize the rate
of first call resolutions.
Action plan summary
The good news is that
these actions/ recommendations are proven approaches to address
these challenges — approaches that have been incorporated by many
progressive organizations for their day-to-day work environment and
not just for mitigating the impacts of a pandemic outbreak. For
knowledge workers, these organizations have deployed Nortel
IP-enabled communications and collaboration solutions so that their
workers are no longer
confined or limited to a physical office location. Solutions like
IP telephony and unified communications are making it possible for
businesses to re-invent the traditional workplace from an
office-based activity to a virtual one.
Employees can now collaborate closely in real time with other
employees, customers, constituents or partners regardless of their
location anywhere in
the world. IP telephony provides resilience in emergencies such as
a natural disaster or a pandemic outbreak. With
today’s modern teleworking toolkit, one can create ad hoc IP
voice connections via IP phones or laptop computers with softphone
software that links to data network connections, including DSL and
cable modems to rapidly establish employee communications outside
of the office.
Delivering the solution:
The Nortel Unified
Communications portfolio
A pandemic is a serious and
challenging issue, and one that must be approached from a number of
angles. Traditionally, mobile workers have always been at a
functional disadvantage relative to those in the office. They are
less accessible, they have reduced access to corporate tools
and information, and are generally not as productive while away
from their desks.
It was always possible to provide some help for these mobile
workers through
single purpose approaches such as cell phones, laptops and PDAs but
at significant costs. This has now all changed.
Nortel enables organizations to conduct their business virtually
through broadband connections and IP-based services.
Additionally, wireless and multi-mode devices — handsets, laptops
or PDAs, for example — can work anywhere there is
standards-compliant wireless or wireline access. The good news is
that Nortel offers a comprehensive suite of solutions (see Table 1
and Appendix) that are ready to go. Maintenance, and Optimization
services in support of this global portfolio of applications and
solutions.
Summary
It is not too late to plan your
organization’s pandemic preparedness. Be proactive and don’t
wait for an emergency or the next crisis to start preparing. The
benefits are obvious — the challenge is how to introduce unified
communications mobility into your organization. Nortel can provide
you with the
time-proven technologies, processes, design expertise and services
necessary to help you realize the full potential of taking your
office anywhere. For over 15 years, Nortel has been enhancing
worker productivity through mobility programs resulting in $9,000
of annual savings per home-based worker and 15 percent improvement
of employee productivity.
Supporting the action plan for workforce and business continuity
planning requires that organizations put in place:
1. Secure remote communications
2. Enable workforce communications and collaboration
3. Augment customer contact capacity and capabilities
Nortel offers trusted and award-winning solutions and services in
each of these areas that are ready to support your organization’s
requirements. These
solutions and a description of their role in workforce and business
continuity planning and pandemic preparedness are summarized
below.
Secure remote communications
Nortel Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
To truly replicate the office environment, organizations need to
ensure that critical information and communications are protected
and secure. Give
teleworkers and traveling workers secure remote access via the
Nortel Virtual Private Networking (VPN) portfolio — VPN Gateway,
VPN Router or Secure Router.
The VPN Gateway lets home office workers and teleworkers log onto
their company network, connecting to key business applications and
services.
Nortel’s VPN Gateway portfolio is a remote access security
solution that extends the reach of enterprise applications to
remote employees, partners
and customers. By leveraging the native capability of
widely-deployed, SSL-enabled web browsers, while also supporting
traditional IPsec VPN access,
Nortel’s VPN Gateway offers the industry’s most flexible and
cost-effective secure remote access solution on the market
today.
The VPN Gateway Emergency Remote Access (ERA) license provides a
simple, low-cost solution to unpredictable increases in demand for
secure remote access — the exact scenario businesses would see in
a pandemic that required employees to work from home. An ERA
license adds capacity to a VPN Gateway device or cluster at a
fraction of the cost of a standard license. Once installed, the ERA
license is available for use — no operator intervention required.
When user demand exceeds the capacity of the standard licenses
installed, the ERA license kicks into gear automatically
and handles all additional incoming connection through use of
broadband access commonly available in homes, users can be
connected virtually all the time.
