Deltek Touts Fix for Slipshod Telecommuting, Jealous Office Colleagues

Last spring, I wrote about a conversation I’d had with Deb Fitzgerald, CIO of project collaboration software provider Deltek, about the development of the business version of the company’s Kona social collaboration platform. That version has since been released, and as a means of showcasing its application in a telecommuting environment, Deltek conducted a survey on how telecommuting is viewed by workers who do and don’t telecommute.

The results of the survey on telecommuting, released today, included some interesting factoids:

• 70 percent of all respondents would rather telecommute than work in the office.
• 81 percent of workers aged 35 to 44 would rather telecommute.
• 66 percent of workers aged 18 to 24 would rather telecommute.
• 70 percent of parents would rather telecommute.
• 56 percent of all respondents said working remotely spurs jealousy among office colleagues.
• 65 percent of workers over the age of 65 said they’re jealous of coworkers who telecommute.
• 60 percent of workers who are parents said they’re jealous.
• 75 percent of workers who earn over $100K per year said they’re jealous.
• 64 percent of respondents said email is an effective way to communicate within a group.
• 20 percent said they still use “paper and pen” to keep track of group activities.
• 22 percent said they keep track of everything “in their head.”

As you might imagine, Deltek is out to fix all that grumbling and those “paper and pen” and “in their head” issues with Kona Business. It does make sense, I suppose, that more effective collaboration would make for less resentment. In any case, the key features include:

• Organization-based administration to securely manage members, projects and data
• An easy place to capture group discussions around specific topics of interest
• Shared task lists and calendars
• Templates for guiding teams on delivering repeatable projects within the company
• APIs and Deltek product integrations
• Polling
• File-sharing integrations (Box, Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as Google Docs)
• Kona Mobile for both iOS (Apple App Store) and Android devices (Google Play)