Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 07/19/04 issue

GSA tries technology to ease telecommuting

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Rep. Davis threatens funding if telework goals are not met

When Wendell Joice became head of the General Services Administration’s government-wide telework team, he didn’t realize how much the Office of Personnel Management would count on him to douse the fire brewing on Capitol Hill over telecommuting.

The House last week passed the Commerce, Justice and State fiscal 2005 appropriations bill with a provision to withhold $5 million from every agency in the bill that failed to meet telework goals. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) sponsored the provision.

Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said he would consider extending the provision to all appropriations bills to pressure agencies to fulfill their telework mandate.

Drew Crockett, a Government Reform Committee spokesman, said Davis has not made a final decision on which bills to amend, because some agencies are responding better to telework opportunities than others.

“This is the type of action required to get the wheelbarrow moving,” Davis said earlier this month at a telework hearing. “The innovations of the information age—laptop computers, broadband Internet service, BlackBerrys and so forth—continue to make location less relevant in the working world. Telework capitalizes on these advances, offering a broad range of benefits to employers and employees.”

That’s where Joice’s office comes in. He and colleagues are trying out videoconferencing hardware and software over broadband connections and will begin testing wireless access at speeds ranging from 56 Kbps to broadband. Joice also is trying to figure out the best way for agencies to pay for wireless access on a per-use basis.

“We want to see what the impact of these technologies will be,” Joice said. “Blending technology with management was a key recommendation from GSA’s report on the technological barriers to teleworking.”

Since January, Joice and three others have been testing videoconferencing hardware from Logitec Inc. of Fremont, Calif., with software from Marratech AB of Sweden, either at their homes or at GSA telework centers.

“We want to get it completely free of glitches and then determine the minimum acceptable speed,” Joice said. “Once we get past that, we would like to make sure it can work inside agency firewalls.”