Empty-Handed: Could Business Travelers Hit The Road Without Their Trusty Laptops?Empty-Handed: Could Business Travelers Hit The Road Without Their Trusty Laptops?

The recent tightening of airport security regulations in the wake of a foiled terrorist plot last week, has spurred some IT managers and analysts to start planning ahead for worst-case scenarios. If greater restrictions on carry-on luggage are a harbinger of security hassles to come, what policies and plans should they have in place to diminish the disruption?

And for some of those IT shops, all of this planning for easier business travel, ease of use and greater equipment and data security has given rise to an "aha" kind of moment: There may be real advantages to implementing these alternatives right now. So why not go ahead and change our thinking and the way we do business on the road right now?

For one thing, while the technology needed to get around the banned laptop issue may mostly exist today, the business culture will need to catch up. If CIOs think they're going to easily pry laptops, the biggest weapon in a business traveler's arsenal, out of users' hands without one hell of a fight, they may be in for a bit of a surprise. We're a culture known for being on the move and constantly in touch. We're a nation of laptop fanatics, plugged into email, enterprise applications, instant messaging and spreadsheets, whether we're in the home office, a caf in San Diego or a hotel room in downtown Newark. We're working night and day no matter where we are. And we're highly attached to the machines that let us do it.

Dan Robison, a senior vice president with GreatLand LLC, based in Orlando, Fla., says if his boss told him to leave his laptop home he'd think the man had simply gone crazy. Robison, who's traveled to Australia, Thailand and Germany this summer, says he made a few business trips without his laptop just as an experiment. He wanted to see if he could survive without it. He did, but barely.

He says he has a smart phone tricked out with Internet access, a small keyboard and Microsoft Office software. But try working on a spreadsheet with a screen that small, he says. He ended up wasting his time on the flight, unable to get any real work done. And then to add insult to injury, he found himself holed up in the hotel's business center instead of comfortably in his room with his feet up getting his work done.

"If you tell me I'm on a business trip for a week and I can't have my laptop, then that's a waste of a week," says Robison.

Robert Jenkens, a vice president with NCB Development Corp., a non-profit organization that works with low-income communities, says it wouldn't just waste his work time. It would start to cut into what's supposed to be his personal time.

"It would be devastating for me not to have a laptop because it would mean that all those 15- and 20-minutes, and two-hour periods you could work when you're traveling would disappear," says Jenkens. "It would reduce my efficiency. I work probably 60 hours a week anyway, and I'd have to come home on the weekends and work another eight to 16 hours to make up for the time I couldn't work on the road.'' Thinking Outside The Laptop

But Richard LeVine, a senior manager at Accenture, a global management consulting and outsourcing company, says business travelers don't have to give up access to their technology. It's just that there might be a better, safer, way to get it. And with millions of dollars worth of laptops lost or stolen each year, there could be real business advantages to thinking outside the laptop.

LeVine, who has flown about 200,000 miles already this year, says it is just that there are things we take for granted, and traveling with a laptop is one of them. "We live a certain way, so we think that's the way things ought to be. We carry laptops, so we think we have to carry laptops," he says. "The fact is, we have technology today that makes it unnecessary."

Russell Boekenkroeger, an executive vice president at Patni Computer Systems, Ltd., an IT services company, agrees. He says the current environment presents an opportunity to get employees to think about business travel in a new way, and provides a chance to take advantage of other options already available, such as open computers in corporate offices and video conferencing.

LeVine says now is the time for CIOs and IT managers to start rethinking their policies when it comes to business travelers hitting the road with laptop bags slung over their shoulders, and business files and applications stored on the traveling machines. He says he frequently attends meetings where people don't even open the laptops they brought with them. Sure, maybe they use them to check email back in their hotel room, but they could have done that with a PDA or a smart phone.

"IT managers should be looking at the cost of having laptops for everybody [versus] the alternatives," says LeVine.

The alternatives, and the technologies that drive them, may not be new, agrees Howard Schmidt, the former White House security advisor and now president and CEO of R&H Security Consulting. What is new, is the willingness to rethink the whole process. Business travel in an era of terrorist threats, overwhelmed baggage systems and tedious security waits is going to be an ongoing problem, he says, especially at smaller airports that can't afford the latest and most likely highly expensive, screening machines.

"Obviously, I'd rather be screened by six men, than carried by six," says Schmidt, who travels between 270 and 290 days out of the year. He leaves for London in two weeks, and plans on going without a laptop. Schmidt says he'll probably bring a portable hard drive and borrow someone's computer system while he's over there. He even says that when he does consulting work, part of the deal will be that upon his arrival they will make a system available for his use. Restrictions = Opportunity

Bob Harrell, president of Harrell Associates, a New York-based airline industry analyst firm, agrees with Schmidt's assessment of the airline security landscape. Though some analysts say the airline industry would lobby too hard for the U.S. to ban laptops and electronics from carry-on luggage, Harrell believes there's a 50/50 chance it will happen at some point.

Anne Rogers, director of information safeguards for Waste Management, Inc., a Houston, Texas-based waste services company with $13 billion in revenue last year, says the company is working up new travel policies that can be quickly put into place if stricter airline regulations come down the pike. And if they stumble upon tactics that might help them now, all the better. The company has 50,000 employees and 6,000 of them are mobile workers.

Right now, Rogers says she's focused on making sure there are open computers available at all of their facilities around the country so visiting employees have a machine to use without bringing a laptop with them. If workers are going to, say a conference, instead, that raises more issues. Will hotels have a computer set up in the room for guests to use? Probably not, even though it's an idea that the hotel industry has bandied around for quite some time. She says if employees can get by with just a BlackBerry and a cell phone, that's what they should do. If they need large, key applications, then they may have to bring the laptop with them.

But that won't always be the case, says Schmidt. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention. And airline restrictions will automatically lead to a new crop of businesses, technologies and market opportunities.

"Think of the business opportunities," he says. "There will probably be a day when you get to the airport, and you go to a kiosk to rent a laptop for your stay in the area. You have a portable hard drive in your checked luggage. You plug it in and don't miss a beat." Schmidt also says he won't be surprised if airlines start installing PCs and screens on seatbacks where the rarely used in-flight phones are located now. He also talked about airports developing special express lines at security checkpoints for people who aren't carrying electronics in their carry-on baggage. "They'll be meeting security needs and business needs at the same time," he says.

For now, however, Schmidt and LeVine say there are plenty of options grounded in the here and now. It's just a matter of figuring out which ones work for different types of road warriors. After all, not everyone is doing the same kind of work. Some can easily get by with a thumb drive and cell phone, while others still need that laptop, and maybe arrangements have to be made to ship it to them.

In his coming travels, Schmidt will be relying on PDAs and cell phones because they're smaller and lighter, so less likely to be damaged when wrapped up and stowed in checked baggage. But Brian Dykstra, CIO and director of education at Mandiant, an information security company based in Alexandria, Va., says he's planning ahead for his mobile workers, and those plans include a lot of FedEx shipping.

"I'm not sure we'd want to be putting valuable company equipment into unsecured luggage," says Dykstra, who flies three weeks out of the month. "We do a lot of mobile training, and we ship our equipment by FedEx anyway. That allows us to secure our cases. They have insurance coverage on it, and it's completely traceable every step of the way." Dykstra adds that employees aren't allowed to keep critical or client-sensitive data on their laptops, and their hard drives are encrypted, as well.

By enabling employees to ship their laptops where they need to be, Dykstra also avoids having to deal with employees who are irate over possibly not being able to have their laptops with them. But if that's what it ever comes down to, he says they'll just have to deal with it. Sucking It Up

"You don't make any money if you dont get on that plane," he says. "There would be a lot of chest pounding, but in the end, you'd have to find a way to just get on the plane."

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos, an anti-virus company with headquarters in Lynnfield, Mass., and Oxford, England, says he'll be one of the people who's OK with traveling without a laptop. He says we've all simply fallen into step with the mentality that we don't go anywhere without our computers. And that's just not necessary.

"Do you really always need a laptop?" asks Cluley, who travels 12 to 20 times a year. "A lot of people are hermetically attached to their laptops almost like someone has sewn an extra limb to their bodies. I can easily pick up another laptop at the other office when I arrive. It doesn't need to be my laptop, as long as it's inside the company and has the applications I need."

And it's a good thing Cluley feels that way.

Charles Southey, the vice president of IT at Sophos, says he's been doing some thinking about having to adjust employees travel policies at some point, and he'd consider not letting business travelers take their laptops with them at all.

While Southey says he hasn't given much thought to employees using thumb drives, he will push them to use guest computers set up at the company's other offices instead. To keep employees' work confidential, he would install SSL (secure sockets layer) VPNs, which can be used with a standard Web browser. It provides a secure connection, and then does a disconnection cleanup so the next person using the computer can't see what the last person was working on.

LeVine says SSL VPNs would be a good idea for computers rented at a kiosk, used at a corporate site or used in a hotel room. And that would relieve some security concerns for people who might think using a computer in a hotel room would be like using the same toothbrush the hotel provides for everyone who stays there.

And to enable workers to be even fairly productive on a hotel or kiosk computer, they'd need access to Web-based applications, according to Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner, Inc., an industry analyst group. If enterprise applications were securely available online, then workers, using a safeguarded SSL VNP connection, could access what they needed from any computer with Internet access. That would broaden the scope of machines they could use to get serious work done.

"Hotels don't offer much of this service now, but if there's demand they would," said Dulaney, while waiting for a delayed flight at JFK airport in New York. "The approach would be thin clientsIf we can't carry our devices with us, we'll focus on people mobility. There will be PCs all over the place, and people will travel to the computers rather than people traveling with them.