Key Takeaways
- Hybrid work decisions are now evidence-based, not assumptions.
- Documented insights help demonstrate responsible use of donor-funded resources.
- A two-person team gained organization-wide visibility without adding headcount.
- Expanding from remote workers to the full organization made workforce visibility part of everyday operations.
- Identified & reduced approximately 40% costs in unused or underused software licenses.
The Summary
The Norton Museum of Art is a donor-funded non-profit organization in West Palm Beach with roughly 130 employees and a 2-person IT department. Ed Cohen, Director of IT and Cybersecurity, ran a two-person IT department that reported to the risk committee of the museum’s board of directors. He had to explain what was purchased, why, and how it benefitted the museum.
When the museum introduced a one-day-per-week work-from-home policy, leadership wanted to know whether it was hurting their productivity. They needed evidence that their 40 remote & hybrid staff were staying productive.
The request came from HR, further supported by their executive team. The museum deployed CurrentWare BrowseReporter silently, with the intent of avoiding any change in the employee behaviour, to get unbiased productivity insights.
The results contradicted their expectations, with their remote employees scoring slightly higher in productivity than their in-office employees. Within a span of six months, the museum expanded their license from 45-remote only devices to 100- company wide organization.
The Challenges
The remote work question that no one could answer.
The leadership wanted to understand if those 40 employees were staying productive while on their work hours when they were working remotely. The challenge was that the museum had no way to answer that question with proof. All they had were assumptions, not data. In an organization where every dollar spent came from a donation, ‘we think it’s working’ wasn’t the answer that could be given to the leadership team or board.
The request came from HR, not IT
The initial request to get visibility into employee activity didn’t arise out of a security incident, or an IT glitch but from the museum’s HR & People manager, backed by the executive team, which made the project into a workforce insight initiative rather than surveillance program. HR wanted to learn how the employees across different work modes were working, so they could make informed decisions about their hybrid work policy.
The solution had to be affordable enough to be justified to donors and the board members
As a non-profit organization, the museum couldn’t spend the way a mid-market commercial company could. The purchasing decisions were peer-reviewed by the board, and any recurring software costs needed a clear justification. A tool that could only prove useful once wouldn’t survive the next budget cycle.
Measuring employee behaviour would change the behaviour being measured
Both HR & IT acknowledge that the employee’s behaviour would change if they knew they were being monitored. They feared that the employees would start performing for the tool, ultimately distorting the results, and they would end up with a picture of how employees worked when monitored and now how they actually worked.
A two-person IT team could not handle an administration- heavy tool
With only two people taking care of IT & cybersecurity for the organization, there was no room for a tool that required constant tuning, manual report building, or a dedicated admin.
The Fix
The Norton Museum chose CurrentWare BrowseReporter to get full visibility into their employees’ activity.
Why CurrentWare?
Cohen reviewed several options but brought in only one for hands-on technical evaluation. CurrentWare offered more feature functionality at a better price point, and gave visibility beyond productivity alone. Per-license pricing let the museum start with only the population it needed to understand, and automated dashboards and scheduled reports meant a two-person IT team could get answers without building them by hand. The same data strengthened Ed’s existing security and risk reporting.
The Implementation
The museum started with a limited license count covering only the one-day-per-week work from home employees, then expanded to every employee with an endpoint device after seeing the results. Cohen evaluated both on-premise and cloud paths and found them equally manageable.
Because the internal team was small, an external IT vendor handled endpoint deployment. CurrentWare fit their existing process: when a device comes on the network, it gets detected and the client pushes out automatically, the same way other software is deployed. Configuring productivity categories for sites and applications took very little time.
The Outcomes
Work-from-home productivity held up
Once the museum had real data from a workforce that was not adjusting its behavior for a monitoring tool, remote employees showed a slightly higher average productivity score than employees working in the building.
About 40% of product cost was recovered in unused licenses
Recovering unused license cost wasn’t the reason they had bought CurrentWare but it stuck out as one of the use cases.
Cohen started tracking how frequently employees actually used specific applications, then audited licenses against that data. He found expensive Zoom licenses and Adobe Acrobat and Design seats that were underused, including licenses still assigned to people who had left the organization and never revoked. By eliminating them, the Museum recovered roughly 40% of what the museum paid for CurrentWare.
They doubled the deployment within 6 months
The initial purchase (45 users) covered only WFH staff. Based on the results, Cohen expanded to every employee with an endpoint device, covering 100 users.
Full workforce visibility, lean IT
A two-person IT team gained visibility across 130 employees without adding headcount or manually building reports.
Board-ready reporting
Pre-scheduled and on-demand reports gave the risk committee documented insights into employee technology usage, replacing anecdotes with data.
The Overall Impact
The Norton Museum started with one question about remote employees and turned the answer into organization-wide workforce visibility.
CurrentWare gave a two-person IT team visibility that would otherwise require manual tracking they don’t have time for. It now supports hybrid work policy discussions, application usage review, license optimization, and budget reporting to the board.
The museum also handled the data deliberately. Earlier, they didn’t share reports widely until IT and leadership understood the analytics well enough to prevent managers from misreading them and building wrong impressions of their workforce. CurrentWare stepped in as a decision-support tool, not a reactionary one.
