Recent experiences with workforce disruptions have consistently pointed to three critical areas of dependency among enterprises. These three areas include access to applications, accounting for people, and communications. While there are some solutions available that address application access, or roll call reporting for employees – there is not really one solution that addresses both, let alone the third. Communications is one of the most critical areas that is required in order to keep employees informed as well as connected to peers, partners, suppliers, and customers. None of the available solutions address communications, a huge dependency that can keep businesses moving forward in the face of workforce disruptions.
Preparing for workforce disruption requires maintaining a solid communications infrastructure. The most common form of workforce planning today includes VPN access to critical employees and distributing IT managed laptops. However, these solutions do not address the social aspect of longer term disruptions. A workplace is more than an office where people can access their applications. It is a social place where communications is vital to projects and employee interactions. Communication misunderstandings between employees can lead to vital business errors. The cost of this can be high, and business continuity mangers must take measures to ensure a proper communications strategy. Business continuity managers should recognize that their organization is a community where employees spend their day building relationships. A framework must be implemented to preserve this social aspect outside the boundaries of the enterprise.
In this article, we discuss workforce continuity at a high level and focus on the social aspect of a workplace, with consideration for technologies that will enable a means for employees to communicate with each other and with customers during an event.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory on how humans seek to meet basic needs in order to fulfill higher needs.
A similar phenomenon occurs during a workforce disruption. People seek to meet personal and family needs first. Everyone’s top priority in the early days of a disruption is to ensure that personal safety and that of their family and community is met first.
The next step is to assess the status and needs of co-workers. Employees find comfort in knowing that fellow employees are safe. Managers must assess the state of their teams and related project teams. Business continuity managers must account for any affected employees.
The next step in this sequence is communication. Everyone in the organization needs to communicate with members of their teams and personally assess how they are affected by the availability of others. This information needs to be properly communicated via the organizational chain and related staff so that others can pick up the critical tasks of those who are not available.
Finally employees must figure out how to leverage the available information and continue to work as best as possible through the event. Tools such as collaboration and messaging become vital for these dispersed workers.
Often the most important aspects of dealing with large workforce disruptions is overlooked – that is preserving the familiarity of the work environment. Business continuity managers should realize that not all employees are used to working remotely without their usual knowledge worker tools. It cannot be expected that every worker, perhaps due to the nature of their role, is familiar with remote access technologies such as VPN and two factor authentications. Many of these workers have seldom or no need to work from anywhere but the office during normal times. A good workforce continuity solution must take this into account and make the access and remote work experience as streamlined as possible, and technologies such as voice integration into applications, click-to-call, and so on become very important. Contacts and collaboration tools should be integrated into applications to minimize the impulse of employees to shun communication because of the labor involved to initiate conversations with collaborative peers.
Since communication is such an important aspect of supporting a dispersed workforce, we will discuss specific issues related to sustaining communications and appropriate technologies.
During a disruptive event, employees may have to take on roles outside of the realm of their normal job responsibility. Some of these individuals will act as communications points within the enterprise. Besides the business continuity team, each employee and manager should be responsible to support a dispersed and remote workforce, many of which rely on a resilient communications infrastructure.
Based on the hierarchy of needs, there are seven basic communication cornerstones to set in place. Later on, we will describe some techniques to make these possible.
Notification
Employees must be notified of the event, with instructions on how to proceed. Several techniques are available today, such as SMS based notifications, e-mail, and voice notification to any emergency contact numbers on file. Responses to these notifications must be recorded and made available to the appropriate personnel. As we will see below, this is the first step to collecting vital status information on the workforce.
Roll Call
Managers and business continuity personnel need to account for displaced employees, collect personal contact information (as this may have temporarily changed based on the event), and get a feel for the employees’ well being and ability to work.
Status and Community Communications
People need to communicate their ongoing status to the rest of the organization and this should be maintained and made easily accessible by other employees. Think of this as an ad-hoc company directory that compliments and augments the actual corporate directory. Teams need to get status information on other team members. Project managers will need to communicate project status information to relevant personnel. Campus information needs to be updated and maintained by the business continuity team. An organization is a community. People spend a significant amount of their time there and build various relationships. Employees generally have a sense of patriotism and the desire to help fellow coworkers. This needs to be facilitated, and can be done via a community bulletin board or portal. Another useful resource can be employee blogs, posting suggestions and information as a way for employees to seek psychological relief.
The more these forms of informal communications can be facilitated, the faster the company can resume to normal business operations, and it is in the company’s best interest for employees to embrace and use such social tools.
Peer-to-peer Messaging and Voice
Enterprises must preserve the ability for employees to reach each other. While many companies think of e-mail as the most obvious form of messaging what they overlook is that over a prolonged period of time, employees will need instant messaging and voice tools. But here in lies the problem – instant messaging is usually setup for normal use by employees without the foresight of adding members they may need to reach in case of a disruption. Many employees interact with peers who are not part of their buddy list. A strategy is needed to ensure that an instant messaging framework is established that consists of critical resources for all employees who are not able to get to the office.
One of the most difficult problems to solve is voice communications. How does an employee call a coworker when all that is known is the coworker’s extension? How does a customer get a hold of an employee or business unit when that person is not at their desk?
Collaborative Tools
As employees resume work, and knowledge workers use business applications and tools, they will also need the ability to seamlessly collaborate with peers. Business workflow needs to be augmented with the right tools to be able to instantly communicate with other knowledge workers to solve problems quickly and efficiently, as if they were next to each other. It is human nature to avoid unnatural forms of communication. When a knowledge worker has to make an effort to track down and contact another worker, the likelihood of collaboration is decreased. With the right technology such as embedded context sensitive click to call within applications, the willingness to collaborate as if the employees were working together is higher. With the right collaboration tools, we will show how this can be made possible.
Visibility
It is important for employees and managers to have visibility into sub organizations. Tools that track productivity, employee availability, and divisional status are important and must be communicated efficiently. This information should be available to managers and departments such as human resources and integrated within the context of the event.
Techniques to Enable Efficient Communications
Business continuity planners have a number of technologies that will aid them with implementing their vital communication components. We look at some of them with a specific emphasis on enabling voice communications.
Alerts and Notifications
The first step in a workforce disruption is proper dissemination of instructions and procedures to all affected employees. Enterprises cannot assume that employee emergency contact information on file is up to date or reflective of where an employee finds themselves during an event. A system needs to be dynamic to cope with the chaotic situation the organization may be experiencing. During Hurricane Katrina for example, many people decided at the last minute where to head for shelter. Cell phones were not always reliable.
Several intelligent, dynamic systems are available for tracking employees. A good system should constantly keep contact information up to date. Enterprises cannot rely on the accuracy of corporate directories given the constant movement of individuals.
A notification system must be two-way. Management needs to account for employees and their whereabouts. Ultimately this will help in assessing project and impacts to customers. Two-way SMS systems do a great deal in continually tracking down employees by sending repeated notifications until an SMS response is received. Some systems track employees down by land lines through voice prompts.
These notifications must relay clear instructions to employees and management. A comprehensive notification should attempt to ascertain the safety employees, inquire about their need for assistance, and then direct them to information or instructions about personal safety and work. An alert is meant to kickstart the business continuity procedure and convey receipt of the message to the rest of the organization.
Workplace Access
The next step is for employees to access their workplace from a remote location. For many employees, this will be the first time they are working remotely, so choosing technology that is very user friendly and intuitive is imperative. The other important aspect is that the nature of a disruptive event is such that we cannot expect employees to be near their usual home or personal computers. Consequently, relying on VPN technology alone does not provide an intuitive user experience, nor is it capable of adapting to a dispersed workforce.
What is needed is a solution that will allow for ad-hoc access from anonymous computers, while maintaining a high level of security for the enterprise.
Telephony Disruption Planning
In order to cope with a displaced workforce from a telephony perspective, the most obvious thing is to allow for dynamic redirection of inbound calls to a subset of extensions. These are the subset of extensions that cover the displaced workers. From a business continuity perspective, it is desirable to make the implemented solution adaptable to the nature of a workforce disruption. It must be flexible enough to work on a subset of the organization and redirect the telephony services to employees at ad-hoc alternate numbers. In most disruptions employees will not know beforehand where their contact numbers will be. A solution that allows users to update their contact information dynamically in real time is necessary. To see how this works, it is good to abstract these services away and view them as a redirection service. Such a service may be implemented internally within the IT organization or outsourced to third-party solutions. Business continuity managers work closely with corporate IT in choosing a solution that meets the business needs. The have to have the following characteristics:
1. Allow for dynamic update of employee contact information. Information should be easily updatable via inlets such as Web pages, call centers, or notification systems. Allow for easy, but non-intrusive integration to the corporate telephony infrastructure. An ideal solution would not impose complicated redirection rules directly on the stable telephony system. Also, many large organizations use multi-vendor PBX infrastructures that make complicated rules-based programming on the telephony architecture less than desirable. Consequently a model where common implementations can defer the redirection decision to a service model would introduce the least disruption. The service can be implemented by IT or outsourced.
2. Retention of existing telephony services is a top requirement. The solution should introduce the least possible disruption to how the telephony system operates regular basis. Service such as voicemail and find-me-follow-me solutions should work as they would during normal business operation.
3. Integration with the rest of the business continuity platform is recommended. Other services, such as instant messaging programs, should be able to query updated contact information collected by the redirection service.
Many such implementation of redirection services exist today. Some organizations have extended find-me-follow-me solutions available from vendors with custom wrappers that integrate such solutions into their workforce continuity plans. The ability to remotely program these solutions becomes critical in the case of workers forced to operate from remote locations. Below we look at some other mechanics to integrate telephony services with redirection services, especially for systems that don’t implement find-me-follow-me, or where users do not use these systems regularly.
Extending Enterprise PBXs to Redirection Services
Let’s consider a few ways to extend the enterprise’s telephony architecture to remote employees in real time, especially in cases where find-me-follow-me services have not been predominantly rolled out. As an example, we will look at redirecting inbound calls from employee extensions to their temporary phones.
It is desirable for an enterprise to provide the following during a disruption:
• The ability to redirect a user’s phone extension to their emergency number.
• Redirect outbound calls over the company’s current PBX systems to reduce operating costs and long distance toll charges for employees.
• The ability to communicate directly from the PC over a soft phone.
• Keep operating costs to a minimum by supporting an IP only service and handle call control redirection as opposed to forwarding media traffic.
For the last five years the main telephony vendors have VOIP enabled their respective PBX’s. This effort was implemented slightly different by each PBX vendor. A trend did emerge briefly among the top three PBX vendors, as H.323 was the standard which some chose to implement, along with in some cases, other proprietary protocols.
Not all PBX vendors jumped on the bandwagon and moved to H.323. VOIP is catching on in the industry with SIP being used to establish communications from PBX-to-PBX and PBX-to-phone.
Most if not all PBXs in the near future will support SIP. The barrier to providing a SIP only solution today is one of cost for the customers and willingness to upgrade to SIP to get integration with a disaster recovery solution.
Telephony administrators have a few different options (in addition to find-me-follow-me) for cost effectiveness, while offering real time call redirection functionality without being disruptive to existing telephony architecture. We discuss three methods of integration, which are H.323, SIP, and a Media Gateway (SIP/PSTN Conversion).
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Communication Components
Telephony Redirection Options
In implementing telephony redirection modules that work over H.323, data gathered from a H.225 setup message is forwarded to a Web service, like that running on a telephony redirection service, which makes decisions in real time whether to redirect the call. In the event of a redirection, the service will use H.323 signaling to identify the number to redirect the inbound call.
Using H.323 based redirection, telephony administrators can configure their PBXs to redirect inbound calls to the telephony redirection service. The redirection service sits in the call coverage path, the same interface used to implement enterprise voicemail today.
An inbound call received as during normal business operations (see figure below) is forwarded to the appropriate extension. The PBX will have implemented a certain "ring no answer" policy, which allows the extension to ring a certain number of times before the PBX forwards the inbound call to a coverage path to be answered by a voicemail system. In this model, the redirection service is inserted into the coverage path and the telephony administrator will configure the PBX to forward inbound calls to the redirection service in case an extension does not answer the call.
The redirection service is a bank of extensions or trunk that terminates and forwards as appropriate.
During normal business operations the telephony redirection service will be configured to not answer the redirected call. Since this information is delivered over H.323 during the redirection operation, the redirection service can make these decisions in real time, without administrative intervention as to which extensions to enable the redirection service for, and which extensions to allow normal coverage path operations. In the event that the redirection service does not answer the call, the inbound call proceeds to enterprise voicemail as normal. If the redirection service does redirect the inbound call, it will do this directly over the incoming H.323 connection in response to the inbound redirected call.
During the redirection directive, the PBX will place the outbound call to the redirected phone number directly, and as no media traffic traversed the actual H.323 connection to the redirection service. This can usually be implemented for fairly large organizations with a limited number of H.323 connections. This trunk will be available for servicing other redirection requests from the PBX while the first call is still active.
When the call redirection service redirects the inbound call, it will eventually respond to the H.225 call setup request from the PBX with an H.450.3 Call Forward Unconditional (CFU) packet that contains the new number where the user can be reached.
If the call redirection service decides to not redirect the call, it can send back a busy signal which will cause the PBX to continue down the coverage path and eventually forward the inbound call to the enterprise voicemail system.
This approach is attractive because it can be easily implemented without the need for additional gateways. For example, this can be easily implemented with vendor PBXs without the need for on-premise equipment because calls are redirected over an IP connection.
The SIP based redirection implementation is similar to the H.323 based approach. In this implementation, information is gathered from the SIP invite messages and forwarded to the redirection service. This information contains similar information contained in the H.225 call setup request, like the calling party and called party information. This information ultimately enables the redirection service to decide if and whom to forward the inbound call.
The SIP Based PBX would forward inbound calls from the unanswered extension to the call redirection service via sip trunks setup on the pbx.
The call redirection service would terminate SIP trunk connections and capture the calling and called party names and/or the redirect number from the SIP INVITE message.
If the redirection service decides to redirect the call, it will do so by responding eventually to the setup message with a 302 Call Redirected Message.
If the redirect service decides not to redirect the message, it does so by sending back a SIP 404 (Not Found message) to produce a busy signal to the PBX. In this case the PBX will forward the call to the enterprise voicemail system.
For legacy PBXs that are not IP enabled, telephony administrators can deploy third-party media gateways that connect to their PBX and expose a mechanism for SIP connectivity. These media gateways can be configured to redirect calls over a single trunk (or very few trunks) even for large organizations, and common media gateways support around 10 call setups per second, which should be acceptable during business disruption scenarios.
The media gateway should support one of the following T1/E1 call redirection methods on the PSTN interface when the device receives a SIP redirect 302 message on the SIP interface (from the redirection service):
• Call Path Replacement (Facility Message over ISDN)
• Call Forward Unconditional (QSIG 931 Supplemental Services – Call Forward Unconditional)
While the media gateway converts the ISDN signaling to SIP, the device must support converting the called party number and called party info from ISDN to SIP to be transferred to the redirection service. As noted in previous sections, this will be required by the telephony redirection service to properly complete the call transfer logic.
The media gateway will terminate the T1/E1 connection, capture the called party name and/or number from the ISDN/QSIG messages, and covert messages into SIP based calls to the redirection service. The media gateway will convert the redirect response from the redirection service by responding to the PBX with a Q.SIG 931 Call Forward Unconditional facility message. If the media gateway receives a busy signal from the redirection service, the inbound call will continue to the enterprise voicemail server.
PBX Configurations
The PBX configuration remains the same across all implementation methods, with minimal disruption to existing deployments. The configuration changes can be broken down into following stages:
• Trunk Setup - enables connectivity to the redirection infrastructure.
• Dial Plan Modification - allow calls placed to redirected services to be sent to the correct trunk.
• Enable called users extension to be transmitted with the redirected call.
• Modify Coverage Path to call extensions destined for the remote trunk. The redirection service should be inserted before the voicemail solution.
Conclusion
There are many ways to address access to applications, notifications and communications, but what is needed is a single solution that ties all of these together. Many organizations have already deployed find-me-follow-me solutions, which have not been integrated into business continuity plans. Communications needs to be a consideration within business continuity plan and must be solved holistically by organizations. Enterprises cannot concentrate on any one piece in isolation. Solving the telephony problem as a silo is less effective than incorporating it with alerting and notification tools, application access, collaboration and messaging tools. In the event of a workforce disruption, communications becomes most effective when all of these are integrated into one seamless solution.
Goutham Rao is CTO for Citrix Advanced Solutions Group. Rao holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from Bangalore University.
"Appeared in DRJ's Winter 2007 Issue"
