Maryland program plans three telecommuting centers. (Charles County Community College project is a collaboration with federal agencies)

SUMMARY: A collaborative program among several agencies, and with Federal funding, has created one telecommuting center and plans two others in suburban Maryland. The centers are being planned carefully to avoid many of the problems that plagued other similar projects. Occupancy rates at the first center are encouraging. This project represents the next generation of thinking on telecommuting centers.

After several years of false starts and mixed success with satellite offices and telecommuting centers in the U.S., we're now starting to see some programs that are much more encouraging.

Southern Maryland is the site of one such program. Based on a 1994 Federal government appropriation of $6 million (that will, among other things, fund the development of two centers in Maryland and two in Virginia), the Charles County Community College is developing three centers primarily for Federal government employees living nearby. The first officially opened its doors last April; it is located in the Smallwood Village shopping center in Waldorf (Charles county), MD. Two others are being planned for Calvert and St. Mary's counties.

The center goes by the name of the "InTeleWorkNet," described as a "workplace reinvention laboratory of Charles County Community College." The program's goal is not only to establish the three Maryland centers, but also (and perhaps more importantly) to develop success models for satellite work centers that can be set up elsewhere. The college has committed to a number of tasks ranging from developing site selection and design criteria and establishing a business plan for a center, to developing training and other support for center users and testing suitable technologies and administrative support options.

According to Eric Blum, who directs the project for the college, the current users are all Federal government agencies. These include the Departments of Agriculture and Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Navy. He expects that employees from other agencies as well as from the private sector will begin using the center.

"An agency rents a workstation for one month at a time; that gives them access to that work area for the month and they can use it however they want," he told me. The fourteen workstations currently available in the Waldorf site add up to 70 available days per week (14 stations x 5 days each) and they are in use an average of 55 days per week, for an occupancy rate of almost 80%. "Some people are here two days every week and some are here one day every two weeks; it varies by person and by agency," Blum explained. The cost is $100 per station per month until the demonstration period ends on September 30; after that, the rental rate will rise to a figure that will allow the center to be self-sufficient.

Blum noted that one unusual aspect of this center is the need for special security arrangements for the military service employees. "We've been able to meet the mandated security requirements by providing appropriate locks and access controls, removable hard drives on the shared computers, having a secure safe in the building, and turning the monitors away from the aisles so people passing by can't see what's on the screen. "