We coined the term," says Forrester Senior Analyst Stephanie Balaouras, who was charged with studying how to keep people productive during a workforce disruption or disaster. The study, commissioned by Citrix Systems and due to be released shortly, surveyed 250 IT and BCP decision-makers to determine:

• the state of business continuity and disaster recovery efforts
• the current level of preparedness
• the demand for enterprises to link workers with the data and applications they need to be productive
• the costs associated with employees being disconnected from the workplace

The resulting paper reports figures consistent with other industry surveys. Nearly 70 percent of organizations have a business continuity plan, and about the same amount feel prepared or very prepared to recover their data centers. But while nearly 100 percent of respondents said it was very important or important to be able to recover their workforces, only 25 percent of feel that they are very prepared to do so.

That gap shows the need for a "workforce continuity strategy" and is the reason she came up with the term, Balaouras says. "Most people kind of miss the workforce part. Bird flu has woken people up because it is a totally different scenario than what people have prepared for. With bird flu, the data center is fine but the people aren't there. It's got them thinking and has forced them to take a step back with their planning."

Forrester's official definition of workforce continuity is: "a strategy that provides for connecting a dispersed workforce to the applications, data, and communications they need in instances where pandemic, transit strike, natural disaster, or other events prevent the workforce from reaching a corporate facility."

Balaouras says workforce continuity plans "encompass three key capabilities." They are: "Access to your applications and data, emergency communications, and access to business applications, like e-mail, CRM, and end-user data itself, as well as access to your full office communications, like phone, voice mail, and collaboration tools."

Murli Thirumale, group VP and general manager advanced solutions for Citrix Systems, believes in both the study findings and the resulting new term. "We've found that data is well-protected, but there is a workforce continuity gap." This gap, he says, is a lack of actionable plans and tactics for "how people who are dispersed and need access to data can access it and continue to be productive when a disaster happens."

"The focus is really on keeping the workforce productive through and immediately after any such emergency event, particularly when they are unable to return to the workplace," Thirumale says. Essentially, employees want em-ployers to "tell me what's going on. Tell me what I should be doing. ommunicate and allow me to communicate with the company, as well as with my peers, and give me access to the information I need to be able to satisfy my customers and be productive."

Damian Walch, knowledge asset services director of IBM BCRS, says "workforce continuity is representative of strategy changes that we're seeing companies employ for their departments and information flow." "The traditional approach to people recovery or work area recovery," says Walch, "is to come up with a mobile location or a work area location of some kind and to physically move people to those locations if there is a major disruption or an outage." A more recent approach is to plan for dispersed workers to work from their homes or other locations via the Internet and connections with corporate IT and communications infrastructure, he says.

"We're seeing some companies putting much more rigor and discipline to the ability of workers to work from anywhere," says Walch. "With the concern about pandemics, many people are using and looking at work-from-home as their strategy."

Will Work-from-Home Work?

Workforce continuity is certainly rooted in a work-from-home - or a work-from Starbucks - scenario. But no matter what you call it, will working remotely really work in the case of a widespread event like a pandemic?

"Probably not," says Walch. He says many companies are "flippantly" relying on work-from-home capabilities that they don't really have. "They say they can do it, but they really haven't thought through it very much."

"What they've never investigated is whether the Internet would be capable of supporting all of those people working from home," says John Stagl, a consultant with Belfor. "The DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has already gone on record saying that the Internet infrastructure in this country could not possibly support that kind of tactical solution because it simply can't handle the volume."

"The real concern about pan-demics is not about whether people can work from their home office, the strain that is placed on the telephone, DSL, and cable  infrastructure because so many people are trying to implement that strategy," Walch agrees.

DRI International President

John Copenhaver sees additional problems with remote and dispersed workforce plans. "I think that it's very easy to say that people can work from home but there are number of different factors that come into play. You need to look very carefully at what the responsibilities of the individual are to see if working from home is even something they can do productively for a more than a very short period of time," Copenhaver says. You also need to consider their surroundings and personal circumstances, he adds. "Working at home, unless you have the ability to compartmentalize your day and to be able to focus on tasks at home, while your home life continues to take place around you, is difficult. If you are trying to work form home and you have children, it is considerably more problematic."

Planners also are discounting "remote supervision" as a potential pitfall, according to Copenhaver. "It's not easy for managers supervising a dispersed workforce working from their homes. You, as a supervisor, have a greater responsibility to supervise that person or group. You can't walk down the hall and walk into people's offices and see what they're working on and know when they hit snags or problems. It's a more difficult task to remotely supervise people." "Not to mention the technology problems," Copenhaver continues. "Just keeping everybody up and running is going to be more problematic. You can't always perform tech support remotely and easily. And it definitely raises security issues and creates cyber-security vulnerabilities.

Walch allows that "a few companies have put some rigor to [work-from-home plans]. They are looking at how companies are truly going to work from home. They've been funded to build out their telecommuting capability. They've looked at functions like soft phones or unified messaging. They've allowed employees to work from home for some part of the time to make sure they've ironed out the bugs in that process." Only those companies that take the tactic seriously and "truly implement it on a day-to-day basis" and account for "collaboration issues" ultimately will be successful, he says.

"When you are working from home and everyone is working from home, you need to try to simulate a level of collaboration using things like instant messaging and the telephone network. Most companies haven't attempted to do that. They just think it will happen. They think it's just magic."

Rather Redundant?

Anybody who knows business continuity knows there's no magic involved. And many experts interviewed for this article were not dazzled by the newest industry catchphrase. "It's just kind of repackaging business continuity from the end-user recovery point of view," says John Jackson, EVP and chief risk management officer of Fusion Risk Management. "I don't see the need for a whole new term or definition. As an industry, I think we have too many terms already. We've got disaster recovery, business recovery, end-user recovery, business continuity, resilience. In my opinion, the industry is already confused. Most people can't provide clear definitions of all those terms and, even if they can, the definitions differ among individuals. Introducing a new term, I don't think, is going to clarify anything. Maybe it has some merit, but I think it just confuses people further."

"Most BC planners now realize that the loss or unavailability of people is a major issue that they have to focus on," Jackson says.

"I guess my initial reaction to this is that it's fine to pay attention to these issues, but it is hardly a new concept," says Copenhaver. "Are we starting to split hairs in terms of literally dividing continuity into subtopics? I would hope that, in a comprehensive business continuity plan, this kind of thing is already being addressed even if it's not being called workforce continuity."

"Is it something that we should pay attention to?" Copenhaver asks. "Absolutely, it is. Is it something that absolutely needs to have separate term? No, but if it causes more people to pay attention to it, then great. However, if we're going to be coming up with more terminology, I think we, as an industry, need to do a much better job of agreeing on the terms we have."

For Paul Streidl, CEO and chairman of the Association of Contingency Planners, "the term is okay, but the definition is too limiting since it implies you have an intact workforce. To have true workforce continuity, an organization needs well-documented job roles, responsibilities and procedures plus an effective cross-training program to ensure non-impacted workers can pinch hit for key impacted workers. Additionally, the definition doesn't mention personal preparedness. What good is having connectivity when somebody is stranded at home with no food and water? People continuity or human continuity are probably better, all-encompassing terms," he says. Citrix's Thirumale and Forrester's Balaouras both say they feel workforce continuity is part of business continuity and should be viewed as a complementary term, rather than a rival one.

"It really fits in within the overall umbrella of business continuity, and it is a key aspect of operationalizing plans," Thirumale says. "Workforce continuity spans a lot of different areas, and it starts really with personal and family safety. Once people are safe and have provided for some supplies for themselves and their families, then they start thinking about the workplace. Is it still open and are my coworkers okay? Then, once they can communicate and collaborate via emergency communications with their peers, they start to think about their productivity and customers."

"Most of the time with a workforce disruption, there is an emotional disruption," Thirumale continues. "People feel that they need to be informed, instructed, and helped in the face of that disruption. What a workforce continuity strategy does is address things at an emotional level and give people a lifeline back to their company and their peers. The social aspect of business is quite significant. If people feel like they understand who is safe and feel like they can communicate with those folks even though they are dispersed, these are all things that restore the employees' confidence in their own situation and the company's situation."

"All workforce continuity is is a strategy to connect that dispered workforce with the applications, data, communications, and the peers they need to be productive in the face of a disruptive event which prevents them from being able to get to their workplace. This is clearly a problem, and it has high impact."

For IBM's Walch, "the term is less important than the capability. What is really important is the ability for employees to pick up their desktop - the applications they utilize, the office applications, pertinent data on their desktop, and the full phone functions - and move that to another location and maintain continuity of that desktop," he says. "I don't care what you call it. What's important is the ability to do it."