Expanding Opportunities Using Amazon WorkSpaces with The Chicago Lighthouse

The Chicago Lighthouse has been in operation since 1906. Today, in 2023, the agency provides 40 programs and services that help more than 50,000 people every year. Its clients access vision rehabilitation, education, assistive technology consulting, and other opportunities that improve their quality of life and empower them to live as confidently and independently as possible.

Among the organization’s social enterprises are 12 customer contact centers, handling calls from a number of healthcare and government clients. These businesses generate just over 60 percent of The Lighthouse’s total annual revenue. Until 2020, it was a completely in-person work environment so that The Lighthouse could provide employees with the adaptive technologies that they needed to accommodate visual and other impairments. But as the COVID-19 pandemic began making its way through the United States, Esmeil Naqeeb, network security engineer at The Lighthouse, saw the writing on the wall. “We knew lockdowns were coming,” says Naqeeb, “so we started looking for solutions.”

Simply shutting down the call centers was not an option. The Lighthouse serves several large organizations in Illinois, such as the Illinois Tollway Authority, University of Illinois Health System, and Cook County Health Systems, so interruptions in service could mean harmful impacts on healthcare and infrastructure around the state. The Lighthouse was also committed to caring for its employees. “Everyone needed to continue receiving a paycheck, paying their bills, and feeding their families,” says Janet Szlyk, president and CEO of The Chicago Lighthouse. “Additionally, our customer service business provides revenues that support our organization’s social services. It was critical they remain open.”

The company’s first idea was to physically deliver computers to workers’ homes, but this would have been prohibitively time consuming and could have potentially compromised sensitive data. In the search for a better idea, The Lighthouse discovered Amazon WorkSpaces, a family of solutions that provides the right virtual workspace for varied worker types, especially hybrid and remote workers. Amazon WorkSpaces customers can get tech support, but The Lighthouse needed very little assistance during the transition. “It worked flawlessly,” says Naqeeb.

To find a way to keep The Lighthouse operational, Naqeeb first created a pilot workstation at his own home. When his home pilot worked, he and his IT team of six tested it in one of the contact centers. It worked well, and Naqeeb proposed an organization-wide solution. On March 17, Naqeeb and the IT team began transitioning employees to remote work. Four days later, on March 21, 70 employees were up and running. Over the next 4 days, the team transitioned another 50 employees to Amazon WorkSpaces. By March 24, 1 week after beginning the transition, 120 employees, many with disabilities, were working remotely, which was enough to continue the call centers’ seamless operations. “Esmeil Naqeeb is our hero,” Szlyk says.

Using Amazon WorkSpaces had immediate impacts across multiple departments. Aaron Baar, senior director of advancement at The Lighthouse, says, “People said how great it was to keep working, to maintain a sense of normalcy and routine in what were not normal times.” Workers in the IT department could access the active directory and keep managing users’ accounts and other on-premises network resources while working from home. In the customer care centers, which employ 119 people who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise disabled, the results were especially remarkable. Several call center employees with visual impairments use ZoomText, an adaptive program that enlarges a computer screen and reads webpages. Licensing each computer individually would have been expensive and cumbersome, but using AWS greatly simplified the process.

The Lighthouse uses Amazon Redshift as its cloud data warehouse. Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data, so The Lighthouse can run complex queries and scale analytics on call center data without managing infrastructure. Amazon QuickSight is a service that powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence at hyperscale. The Lighthouse uses Amazon QuickSight to power millions of weekly dashboard views so that all users can meet analytic needs from the same data sources and make better decisions. The Lighthouse runs these services on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a logically isolated virtual network that gives customers control over their networking environment, resource placement, connectivity, and security.

In solving the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, The Lighthouse also ended up finding new solutions to support long-term accessibility and inclusion in its workforce. Commuting in and around the third largest US city can be challenging in the best of times, even without added complications due to weather, transportation, or accessibility. Offering work-from-home options turned out to be a tremendous boon—not just for workers but also for the business itself. “It’s our new normal,” Szlyk says. “We’re a hybrid organization now.”