Page 38 - GCN, May 2016

TELEWORK
“The real outcome is ensuring that our folks have the tools they need to work from anywhere...using those devices,” Gardner said. “Mobility has always been part of our ethos in the field, but now we’re really bringing that to headquarters and the regional offices as well.”
USPTO’S VIRTUAL OFFICE
At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Of- fice, 11,000 employees out of 12,600 are teleworking at least one day a week, said Danette Campbell, director of USPTO’s Telework Program Office.
About 5,700 of them have relin- quished their office desks to work from home full-time, which has allowed the agency to maintain its large workforce without adding office space, she said.
To support the intricate workflow of the patent-approval process, USPTO offers its teleworkers a virtual dupli-
cation of the tools available to office- based staff.
“Our immediate telework goal is to continue to emulate the environment that users experience in the office,” Campbell said. “In the long term, we want to ensure we have the latest, most reliable suite of tools available to both our on-campus staff as well as to our teleworkers.”
USPTO currently offers some hotel- ing features, but because of its high percentage of off-campus telework- ers, most collaboration in the patent process takes place via a set of unified communications and voice-over-IP services, as well as Skype for Business and Cisco WebEx videoconferencing platforms.
“Our workforce is composed of sci- entists, engineers and attorneys,” she said. “To get their work done, they must communicate and collaborate;
it’s a huge part of what we do here.” Because of the technical sophistica- tion of USPTO workers and their work- flow, the agency is open to acquiring additional collaborative apps. “I’m sure that with tech exploding, there will be even bigger and better tools” in
the future, Campbell said.
THE TELEWORK TOOLBOX
Managers are turning to a number of mobile tools that are rapidly becoming the standards for workflow collabo- ration. Those tools typically bundle texting, chat, telepresence and vid- eoconferencing so that workers from different locations can tap into one or more conversations at any given time.
Today, most agencies have some form of web-based conferencing ca- pabilities, and more companies are adding a video component to their offerings, said Rich Costello, a senior
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