Redistributing the Workplace - ' Cases in Point'

Cases in Point: The GAO and Congress

CIO Insight: You have written about an interesting example of all this involving the GAO and the Congress. Can you tell us about that?

Grantham: The basic point is that the General Accounting Office, coming out of Y2K, had already started making preparations to distribute data centers, to move a lot of its operations to wireless mode, to have stocks of portable computers that were all preloaded with applications they needed.

So when Sept. 11 came along, and more specifically the anthrax scare, the GAO was saddled with the responsibility of figuring out where to put the U.S. Congress. All of the representatives and their staffs were moved out of their buildings because of the anthrax scare. I think that they got the call on Friday afternoon and by Monday morning they had that entire central part of our government in a totally distributed setup with wireless laptops. Data was moved out. They even had video-over-IP working for a lot of these folks. And they did it in the space of like three days. It was absolutely amazing.

And we never noticed it, we never noticed that the U.S. Congress went from a centralized work place to a totally distributed work force in the space of a weekend, which has made many of them wondering why they need to go back. And they're still wrestling with it. That was a crisis, and everybody was mobilized, and there wasn't a lot of bickering among vendors. People simply just got stuff done quickly.

But to me, another reason we've used it as a case study is that it shows, yes, we can do this. There's really no reason that we can't do this. It just took a time of crisis. And this is a public sector example; we often like to think of the public sector being behind the times in technology. This is a shining example of them being out there in the forefront.