March 1, 2004 (Computerworld) --
Every Police officer's nightmare is to be wounded on the streets -- alone. So when the Orlando Police Department pilot-tested new Global Positioning System (GPS) units, which let the central office track officers' locations, you'd think the officers would have been grateful. Gratitude, however, wasn't much in evidence during the pilot program, according to Conrad Cross, CIO of the city of Orlando. "The officers felt it was intrusive to be monitored 24/7 and didn't see much benefit in their day-to-day work," he says. The unions "raised a lot of noise" and the project was canceled, Cross says. Many companies monitor employee e-mail and Internet usage, and Web-based security cameras are commonplace fixtures in office buildings. However, technologies such as GPS and employee badges with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags promise to take employee monitoring to an entirely new level. Today's tracking systems can record, display and archive the exact location of any employee, both inside and outside the office, at any time, offering managers the unprecedented ability to monitor employee behavior. Although there's a business case for employee tracking, organizations that implement these technologies can, like the city of Orlando, walk into a minefield of employee morale. "CIOs must measure expected benefits against potential problems," explains Richard Hunter, a privacy analyst at Gartner Inc. "And even then, CIOs must tread lightly if they want to avoid a user backlash." Benefits and Risks On the surface, tracking employees seems like an obvious way to boost productivity. Monitoring the location of truck drivers on the road, for example, allows dispatch offices to route deliveries more effectively, says Steve Vivanco, vice president of technology and marketing planning at Chatsworth, Calif.-based MobilePlanet Inc., which sells GPS and other portable devices. On-the-road monitoring can make it easier to provide roadside assistance, reduce damage claims and lawsuits, and possibly reduce goldbricking and excessive break times. Similarly, monitoring employees in the office using RFID technology can help management quickly locate key people and keep unauthorized personnel out of secure areas, reducing employee sabotage and theft. Seen in this way, monitoring becomes an extension of other forms of in-house security measures, such as the monitoring of e-mail and the control of access to corporate computing resources. "There's a general understanding among CIOs that the biggest security dangers are always from inside," says Bill Packer, CIO at Irwin Home Equity Corp., a lending institution in San Ramon, Calif. He notes, however, that body-tracking technologies are of questionable value inside financial firms like his. But in environments where physical security is essential, the ability to track employees using RFID and GPS could prove valuable, Hunter says. 'The Naked Employee' Despite
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