IT notes for "Return to the Office"

We are building our processes for "Return to the Office"

We have a small IT team, we are in the middle of EOFY processing, starting our Audit and Tax busy season and in the middle of a surprise IT Security Audit from Grant Thornton International whilst at the same time in the middle of lockdown, on reduced hours and working from home.

To add to this load over the past few weeks my team has been preparing our firm to return to the office, at Grant Thornton we have different offices all over the country, the management structure is decentralised, this creates small differences between offices. That combined with the differences in approach to CoVid restrictions and the status of the virus pandemic there are a lot of differences between states.

Making people safe is our priority.

To say that the firm wants to demonstrate care to our community is an understatement, we have been working on ways to make sure if and when people come back into the office they feel safe, are safe, and we meet all government guidelines that are in place. 

I thought it would be nice to share what we have done so far. Obviously its a moving target so please keep that in mind.

GTSpace: To keep track of who is coming into the office and to restrict numbers in each area we created a booking application, it started with some really simple principles: Easy to use with no more than a couple of clicks to book, no confidential data stored, minimal authentication to ensure there are no excuses for not using the process. First, we scanned the market to see what commercial solutions were out there that would meet the needs, there are some impressive tools, however, most are fully functional booking systems whose core purpose was not made for this scenario, plus the ones we did find were expensive for what we needed or had a cost per booking. So we wrote our own. We envisioned a yoga booking application that was so simple and stuck to our principles, launched last week, that linked the data to our Salesforce Einstein to provide reporting, i.e. did you book and not show up, did you show up and not book etc. Demo.

Office: There are a lot of little things we are doing, signs, desk separation, cleaning. We have removed all keyboards, mice and chargers from all desks, as all of our people have laptops already with a built-in keyboard and mouse. Go Wireless: We have asked our people what they would like and out of our 1400 or so people, 900 asked for a personal Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. We selected the best possible kit we could find the Microsoft Designer Desktop, some of our people (about 100) preferred a mouse only, and they will get a Microsoft Arc Mouse. The remainder of people are happy with their laptop keyboard and trackpad or are allowed to change their mind. Our CEO Greg Keith, feels strongly that a persons keyboard and mouse is the first and last things you touch in your day and they have to be quality, and make you feel good, I agree, this is not a give a wireless keyboard that is rubbish just to say we have done, a lot of research went into this.

Meeting Rooms: With the new restrictions meeting rooms had to adapt. Nationally we have over 120 meetings rooms with a majority being video conference enabled. All of the rooms need to be cleaned after each meeting and have their people capacity reduced. We investigated putting together a new room booking process creating a linked form, however, Skype for Business meetings created a challenge for logistics with the information needing to be in the appointment for the system to work. In response we have reduced the capacity of each room and made every room have a delegate to approve the meeting and then allocating another meeting after for cleaning. The last consideration are private meetings and how to allow exchange delegates visibility, it is likely that private meetings will be declined in the near future.

Visitor Log: This seemed simple, a quick form to have visitors sign in to help with contact tracing, a lot of places have this, however at Grant Thornton we respect our clients' privacy and have strict controls. The principles were a digital no-touch form and to automatically delete the record after a period of time. We looked at our options and the best fit product was Nintex, so we created a form for visitors in Nintex that auto deletes after the agreed time. As people walk in they will see the form with both a link and QR code. Could have easily used Microsoft Forms for this if it was not for the auto delete requirement which we could not work out simply.

Thermal imaging device: We have placed tablets on a stand at each entry point to our office, these devices look great and are highly configurable, they can link to an API for all sorts of enhanced configuration, however once again to respect privacy we have disabled some of the features. The settings enabled are; auto delete logs after the agreed time, do not store photos, disconnected from the network, encrypted, alarms disabled. The person walks towards the stand, pauses have their photo taken and temperature measured and is given a green light to pass or a red light to go back. The devices we are using were purchased from a local manufacturer and so far have been fantastic, I personally went to the factory and met the designer to get my head around the security and physical devices. More information can be found here: https://noncontact.com.au/. This means that both our people and our clients do not have to have contact or even close proximity to check temperatures.

With these initiatives we found that whilst something seems simple, when you dig into it there are a lot of privacy considerations, technical gotchas and usability impacts. For example, what is the point of a booking system that no one will use, what is the risk of someone using the temperature checking information with bad intentions or iIf we had of introduced a more complex room booking system, for instance, Imagine the S4B challenges we would face with room-based VC bookings being booked outside of Outlook? The devil is in the detail.

More to come for sure on this as we continue to adapt and innovate.

A great team effort with special #Kudos going to Andrew Wrigley, Benjamin Wright, Dean Whitehouse, Carlo DeFazio, Chin Hettiarachchi, Chrystal James, Konrad Hoehle, David Carson, Paul Hickey, Tom McElhinney, Torben Scorgie and William Vuong.

Hope this helps get some ideas out there.