Sure, every now and then it’s fun to go to an office and work on group projects, but yes, this reporter prefers working at home.
Hurst tells of a friend of hers who was a work at home agent for seven years -- longer than the average call center agent lifespan, and that “had nothing to do with the work, it was based primarily on the location of her desk.”
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Call center outsourcing is like any other business – if it’s done where it can be done most efficiently everybody benefits – customers get the lowest prices, companies find cost savings and people can be freed up to do what their most efficient work is.
However, grandstanding American politicians with a less than robust grasp of or concern for economics are threatening to force American companies to establish call centers here in America, instead of allowing them to be outsourced to where the work can be done more efficiently.
They’re proposing to make companies that have call centers overseas ineligible for grants and guaranteed loans from the federal government. It also proposes a $10,000 a day penalty on US call centers that fail to report its relocation to an offshore location within 60 days to the Labor Department.
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A new report by Global Industry Analysts says the video conferencing market is set to grow in the coming years and will become a $14 billion global industry by 2017.
That’s from Mother Nature Network -- everybody’s networking these days, it seems -- which notes that it’s also going to bring along “improved image quality, increasing adoption among small- and medium-sized businesses, and rising demand from developing markets, such as ones in the Asia-Pacific.”
We hear them on the increased image quality. For a long time we couldn’t understand why video conferencing wasn’t wildly popular, why everybody and their brother weren’t doing it, then we were in a video conference with, uh, less than wonderful image and sound quality. It was as painful an experience as we’ve had recently, and we include watching the entire Jack & Jill trailer in that.
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An excellent, thorough white paper recently produced by Splashdata, titled “Secure and Efficient Password Administration Problem Solved by SplashID: Managing Passwords and Other Confidential Records in the Secure Enterprise,” deals with, as you might suspect, the problem of password security, critical in the modern enterprise.
Nobody argues with the notion that employees need more secure usernames and passwords, yet this increasing volume of username/ password combinations leads to major issues for IT managers.“Without the right password and information management solution, it is difficult for enterprises to simultaneously maintain employee productivity and ensure password and information security,” the paper contends, and it’s hard to disagree with that.
The SplashID paper does a good job identifying some of the major problems insecure passwords cause, with lack of compliance coming in first. There are well-known, accepted standards for creating and maintaining secure passwords, the paper says, “including specifying length, type of characters, and frequency of password changes.”
