By Maryann LawlorClassified ads that read “Work From Home” are appealing to everyone who faces a long commute each day. While some job offers are nothing more than scams, one well-known high-tech company has a program in place that allows more than one-third of its employees to enjoy the comforts of home—or near home—as their work environment every day. As a result, the firm has realized huge cost savings and employees enjoy immense job satisfaction and improved quality of life.
As one of the leaders of technological innovations, Sun Microsystems Incorporated (www.sun.com) has helped hundreds of organizations realize efficiencies by employing information technology. Every day, the company practices what it preaches by enabling 14,000 of its 35,000 employees to work from home, satellite locations, client sites or on the road. It’s more than telecommuting; it’s a mobile workforce that Sun executives call the new workplace.
Bill Vass, vice president of corporate software services, information technology, Sun Microsystems, explains that the company’s iWork program originated in 1995 with mobile telephone capability and today is built around providing employees with thin-client hardware called the Sun Ray and a Java badge.
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| Sun Microsystems’ employees can go to an iWork café near their homes and access their desktops from one of the Sun Ray stations or collaborate in one of the facilities meeting rooms. |
Vass describes the Sun Ray as comparable to having a television set rather than a computer monitor as the window to the desktop. The appliances can be located in an employee’s home or Sun offices, so workers have access to their files and applications in a multitude of sites. Broadband access is required.
Vass compares the company’s access token to the U.S. Defense Department’s Common Access Card (CAC), which offers secure access to facilities and systems. “So you can walk to any office any place or be at home, stick your card in the device and, in about three seconds, it encrypts your desktop and delivers it to you with the cursor still blinking on the last e-mail you were typing or the last document you were working on. You don’t have to carry a device back and forth with you. You don’t have to carry a device from room to room. Your network presence is instantly delivered to you anywhere you happen to be,” Vass says.
Because the Sun Ray has no local operating system or disk drive, users do not have to rely on systems administrators to come to their site to install a driver or security patch. The network, rather than the desktop, carries all of the intelligence.
The company also is enabling the Sun Ray to handle voice as well as data communications, Vass explains. By inserting the badge into the Sun Ray, the Sun Ray becomes the employee’s telephone. When the badge is removed, voice communications transfer back to the employee’s cellular telephone.
“Broadband has really enabled this kind of technology to be there and never get a virus and be totally secure, because you know who’s connected,” Vass states.
The Sun Ray devices come in a variety of styles. Some are the size of a micro-miniature central processing unit while others are built into the monitor. In addition, two sizes of laptop devices are available. The company provides the devices, which range in price from $60 to about $2,000.
Client devices are divided into two types. Managed clients are administered by the company’s systems administrators. Unmanaged clients, which include cellular telephones, can be used anywhere and allow employees to enter the system through Sun’s portal so an employee’s applications and desktop are delivered to the user through virtually any computer.
What types of applications and data users can see through the portal depends on three elements. Every channel, application, service and presentation is assigned risk and role values. If the user logs into the portal using a badge, which features strong identification authentication, all the channels can be viewed. If the user logs into the portal from another computer using a password generator device, fewer channels are accessible. If a user logs in with just a user ID and password, even fewer channels are available. Approximately 70 percent of the channels are still available using only a user ID and password, Vass says.
Working from home is only one mobile option; the iWork program offers flexibility to nearly all of Sun’s employees. It allows employees that work on site every day to move from office to office, plug in the badge into any computer and access their desktops. Nearly every employee can go to a Sun drop-in center, generally located outside large metropolitan areas, plug into a computer and begin working.
The flexible work environment does not come without a price tag. During the past six years, Sun has invested $18 million in developing and sustaining iWork operations. However, it also has resulted in millions of dollars in cost savings for the firm, Vass states. In fiscal year 2003, the company saved $53 million in information technology expenses and $71 million in real estate costs. It also saves $6.1 million per year on power expenses.
Technology management staff numbers also are reduced. The company has 17 systems administrators for every 2,700 Sun Ray users, and a single systems administrator can manage 12 Sun Ray servers.
As with any change brought about by technology, the cultural aspects of the program have posed the most significant challenges, Vass allows. Although managers within global organizations may never see many of their employees, there is comfort in knowing that they are in an office for a designated number of hours each day. Vass points out that managers must change their mindsets and adopt a goal-based rather than time-based view of productivity.
