Keywords: electronic market, teleworking secretarial activities.

The convergence of computing and telecommunications has generated a cultural and an economic revolution which is changing our life style. One of the visible consequences is the emerging of teleworking, a new way to work which is modifying consolidated human habitudes. Notably, telework is a growing market of the work that involves ever new professions as the technological development of the communication system allows distant operability at ever lower costs [1]. Many activities in private enterprises or public offices are demanding for teleworking either to improve the quality of service or to increase production. It is now an almost matter of fact that project staff and secretarial people work more efficiently and comfortably staying home at their own PC connected to the enterprise LAN. In particular, the aim of much secretarial service in business world is to support moving managers and to precisely satisfy their needs at the right time, in the right place. Thus teleworking is the right way to achieve an high quality of service, available at any time, characterised by real continuity, professionalism and low delays. Virtual reality provides the flexibility that was awaited for a long time by headquarters and enterprises.

In this paper, we analyse the feasibility of teleworking for the secretarial profession in administration centres and as a direct support to businessmen, scientists and professionals [4]. We will consider the realisation through public telecommunication systems which lets us obtain a real independence from both place and time. The open connections impose some expensive logical protection by means of cryptography, but in turn we have a better control of every safety and managerial aspect.

The service paradigm that we will describe allows different people working in different places to exactly satisfy the needs of a single person.

The introduction of teleworking is motivated if organisational, interconnection and management costs are compensated by benefits for the enterprises and for the workers. One benefit for the enterprises is a more efficient use of expensive human resources. Whereas, one of the benefits for the working people is a quality of life improvement.

The paper, is organised as follows. In the first section we describe the functions of a secretary. Then, in the following section the same work is seen as a telework and the implications are briefly discussed. In the next section, we dwell on communications requirements. Hence, security protocols necessary for a reliable activity are shortly illustrated and analysed.

Secretarial functions

Objective of any secretarial activity is to free other workers from the waste of time due to subsidiary jobs in order to guarantee continuous operability, higher production and efficient use of expensive resources like managers, scientists or professionals. Secretarial activities are a typical auxiliary work, thus, in principle, they do not require personal contact. However, secretarial tasks imply very different degrees of expertise, and we wish to distinguish three fundamental levels, namely, basic secretarial service, adjoin value secretarial service, and high professional secretarial support.

Let us list, by the way of reference, some activities pertaining to each level. The basic secretarial service include, but is not limited to, typing and making up with a word processor, managing telephone calls, and translation of shorthand texts. The activities of the adjoin value secretarial service require some further skill and include, but are not limited to, correspondence protocols (even electronic), producing and sending commercial letter, managing the intercommunication with administrative supports, managing scheduled meetings, translation of commercial letters to foreign languages, making up HTML texts, producing slides presentations. Lastly, the activities of the high professional secretarial support require independent working capacity, and include redaction of agreements also in foreign languages, managing and keeping the account, design of stands, design and production of advertising material for the WEB.

Nevertheless, the distinction among various levels of competence is not strict, given that the same function could be performed at different levels with different skill. It is easy to convince ourselves that most of the activities in the above sample list can be performed at distance. For instance, making up with a word processor can be executed on a text which is typed under dictation via telephone, corrected electronically and printed only if necessary. Managing telephone calls is already done at distance. Similarly, translation to and from foreign languages is an asynchronous activity and it is not strictly connected with a person but could be done at distance, in different time, by different learned people.

Secretarial activities as a teleworking

At the end of the previous paragraph we have observed that many secretarial tasks can be executed at distance, and more than that they are ideal for virtual environments created by telecommunication links. Looking at this realisation, a feasible paradigm is shown in figure 1, where we distinguish three components: 1) the MANAGER, that is a manager, a scientist or a professional, who can be in the office or travelling around the world, 2) the SERVER, that is secretarial personnel who stay at home, 3) the WORLD, that is the community involved into the business. For implementing such a model two requirements are important. First, communication links with sufficient bit rate to allow friendly operations with terminals. Second, a security model assuring the necessary privacy, in order to maintain safe the "place" where sensible information flow. In fact, secrecy is a basic issue for computer systems that store and manipulate sensitive information, that should be achieved in a transparent way to the operators.

Security is realised with cryptographic algorithms embedded in hardware and software systems and making the operators submitted to a security discipline which is indispensable to avoid intrusions or any other action of damage from third opponent parties.

Beside the needs of proper telecommunication infrastructures and computing power, the most critical difficulty is the routing of the activities, because a stage manager or a supervisor is unbelievable. The task is made more difficult by the missing of standard products, i.e. software, capable to redirect high level activities, although maintaining security features and easy operability. Therefore, one of the skills required for secretaries that telework is the capability to manage the connections.

Figure 1 – The Secretarial work-at-distance paradigm

The development of secretarial activities at distance through public telephone lines needs computing resources which characteristics depend on people role and jobs. In particular, referring to figure 1, some technical requirements, matched to different functions, are necessary for ease operability. The links with the variable part WORLD, via standard telephone lines with voice-fax yield a sufficient operability, however it is recommendable that WORLD has an Internet access via an Entry-level PC.

The link between the part SERVER and the part MANAGER should be on ISDN base line with Voice, Fax and Internet access facilities. Moreover the characteristics of the information system for the SERVER should be based on a Middle-Level PC equipped with dedicated software.

Lastly, for MANAGER or for SERVER high professional personnel, the characteristics of the information systems should be upgraded to an Internet access at transmission rate ³ 128 kb/s and an High-Level PC equipped with professional software.

We have not mentioned Printers, even if this classical output equipment will be indispensable for some time, because paper documents are and will be in use still for years to come.

As regard to the quality of communication links, in principle, secretarial activities do not require an out of service low probability, however use of ISDN connections, which are mandatory for good quality Internet accesses, assures very low channel error probabilities.

It is an almost trivial observation that communication secrecy is a must condition for secretarial teleworking. Although, a safe communication link is not easily realisable because it requires the concurrent application of valid cryptographic communication protocols and a disciplined behaviour by every operator. The first condition is satisfied by modems equipped with encrypting machines and cryptographic protocols that allow private connections in easy, transparent way, that is without annoying delays and hand shakes. The second condition is less easy, because in this context, it is impossible that all actors have a valid security training, especially from the manager part. Therefore the virtual travelling secretary should be prepared to compensate for the possibly superficial preparation in security matter of the counterpart.

Here, we do not dwell on the very interesting cryptographic technicalities, but we outline a feasible encryption scheme and recall the parameters which are visible by the operators of the system. Let us observe that the adopted cryptographic scheme must guarantee authenticity and confidentiality, whereas integrity results as a consequence of confidentiality. Therefore every communication session has an initial handshake for authentication of the parties and for setting a common channel key CK. The channel key is used to synchronise the enciphering data machines contained in every modem. Let us remember that a binary stream, encoding both voice and data, is enciphered by a bit by bit EXORing with a stream generated by a finite state machine. The authentication protocol may be very secure because we assume that both MANAGER and SERVER share some secret key SK. Therefore the authentication mechanism consists in a two passes handshake: the MANAGER generate a random number RAND and sends it to the SERVER with his identifying number IDM in clear. The SERVER computes an authentication number AN= f(RAND,IDM,SK,IDS), using a one way function f(.), and sends it to the MANAGER together with his identification number IDS. The MANAGER computes the same function and, if the results match, then the secret communication starts using a secret key CK= g(RAND,SK) obtained using a one way function g(.).

If the secretarial activities concern very sensitive information, therefore it is safer that also the far workstations are identified by some Identification Secret Number ISN to be used during the authentication session. The key management may be safe using smart cards which can be read by PC terminals.

We have briefly analysed the characteristics for teleworking secretarial activities. We have seen that, on public telecommunication networks an adjoin value for the enterprises comes from time, space and working personnel independence which result in a better quality of service. Whereas, workers gain in quality of life. However, the management of the new job may be initially hard due to technical difficulties that come from the routing of far personnel resources and sensible activities. Moreover the still high communication costs may obliterate any positive advantage. It is foreseeable that the deregulation that is investing the present day telecommunication systems will lead to interconnection costs that will make secretarial teleworking competitive with traditional office organisation and equally advantageous to enterprises, working people and telecommunication providers.

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