Edward Meager. Deputy CIO, Department of the Interior

Telework and Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP) often are managed by staff on opposite sides of the building, but they need to work together if either initiative is going to be successful, says Ed Meagher, Deputy CIO of the Department of Interior. “They're two utterly, distinct efforts, but they're doomed to failure if they don't work together,” he says.

Meagher's COOP Laws COOP must be owned by the senior executive COOP is serious and everyone must know and accept it COOP must be codified in policy COOP has a significant cost which must be known and paid COOP must be operational 24/7 COOP must be exercised, updated and validated continuously—a task made possible and practical by cooperation with the agency's telework program

Why? Because, according to Meagher, telework and COOP have a truly symbiotic relationship. An agency's telework program can appear to be going along just fine, with performance and productivity meeting all expectations—except that they haven't considered, put in place, or kept up with the oftentimes more stringent security requirements that will be necessary to continue operating during a COOP event.

“So what happens if there's a security situation?” Meagher asks. “The red flag goes up and teleworkers get shut down because the COOP plan says no one comes into the network without two-factor authentication and all the other security actions that are needed in order to be brought into the network safely when an incident is taking place.”

By contrast, he says COOP without telework gets boiled down to a once-a-year, one-week test of COOP capabilities, an event that manages to bring to the fore all the steps that should be taken to improve emergency preparedness and planning, but often gets lost over time in the day-to-day tasks of agency life.

Telework, by contrast, is a daily test of your COOP capabilities, Meagher states. “You get to figure out and support all the remote operating issues and people get familiar with how to successfully address day-to-day security problems, like losing a password or having an out-of-date encryption key, so they can keep working no matter what. With telework, instead of just practicing one week a year, an agency is actually doing COOP 24/7/365 and dealing with and figuring out problems routinely.”

Telework initiatives stand to gain plenty of benefits by working with the COOP office. A major one is budgetary. Telework is not an inexpensive proposition, especially when it comes to meeting security requirements, and COOP often has funding that can be granted to or leveraged by a telework program.

Another benefit is visibility. Thanks to its mission-critical nature, COOP often has the full attention of the agency's senior executive, and if the COOP office is working with the telework program to practice and work out the kinks in an emergency preparedness plan, telework will gain a higher level attention and hopefully endorsement as a productive and practical way of doing business.

Finally, Meagher says, a COOP-telework alliance will ensure that the agency's mission-critical operations stay up and running in the event of a disaster. “It's huge, a real mint,” he says. “If you have both projects working together, what you are really doing is assuring that in the event COOP gets declared, you're actually going to succeed.”