FCW Perspectives
Connecting and supporting the post-pandemic workforce
The government's emergency pivot to telework in 2020, while impressive in both speed and scale, was in many ways a tactical scramble for stopgap solutions. Now, with a year of experience and the prospect of post-pandemic operations on the horizon, IT leaders are reshaping their agencies' plans for secure connectivity going forward.
FCW recently gathered a group of IT leaders to explore how they are approaching both the workforce and IT infrastructure challenges. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see sidebar for the full list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here's what the group had to say.
Collaboration is key
A full 12 months into maximum telework when the mission allows, the participants agreed that structuring most systems to be location-agnostic was no longer the issue and that a solid foundation was in place. Several said the emphasis now is on supporting better collaboration among far-flung team members.
"If you begin with the assumption that there's more work that's going to be done remotely," one official said, "the other piece of the roadmap that we're looking at a lot more carefully is how collaboration occurs — particularly if you're assuming that there's always going to be a remote presence in that collaboration."
Participants
Michael Anthony
CIO, National Transportation Safety Board
Donald Bauer
CTO, Global Talent Management, Human Resources Executive Branch, Department of State
Sean Connelly
Trusted Internet Connections Program Manager and Senior Cybersecurity Architect, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
John Coyle
Telecommunications Branch Chief, Defense Information Systems Agency
Edward Dowgiallo
Senior Technical Advisor, Department of Transportation
Conrad Jalali
Portfolio Manager, CDM DEFEND, CISA
Robert Leahy
Deputy CIO for Operations, Internal Revenue Service
Patrick MeLampy
Juniper Fellow, Juniper Networks
Howard Spira
CIO, Export-Import Bank of the United States
Don Troshynski
CTO, 128 Technology, Juniper Networks
Note: FCW Editor-in-Chief Troy K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion. The April 13 gathering was underwritten by Juniper Networks' 128 Technology, but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither the sponsor nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their April 13 comments.
Another raised the "pedestrian" but important question of "how do we equip our conference rooms on site to allow people who are working remotely to feel part of the meeting, to feel totally engaged? It seems pretty straightforward, but we're finding that it's not. It's actually going to be quite expensive."
A third participant said hybrid collaboration "also affects document management strategies, including workflow and a lot of interactions that with a physical presence are handled one way but require a technology approach that's a little bit different when you have that remote assumption."
Although several participants said their organizations' adoption of Microsoft Office 365, Teams and other platforms had proved invaluable, the human habits were still a work in progress. "How you engage with the tools and how you behave in a collaborative context can have a big knock-on effect on how your colleagues experience the collaboration," one noted. "If we don't pay attention to behaviors, oftentimes we can be very suboptimal with the use of the tool. So another thing we're thinking about is a lot more outreach and proactive evangelism about how we want to see people interact with the technology."
Finally, the group agreed, the variety of platforms being used continues to pose challenges. "Our entire environment in our building is locked down," one official said. "So it's been quite challenging when people pop up and say, 'Oh, here's the Zoom meeting. Here's a this meeting. Here's a that meeting.' If you're on site — in some cases we do have a lot of on-site presence — we couldn't even participate in some of these collaborations."
When it came to individual work, one surprisingly persistent question was how much hardware to provide for remote workspaces. Although computers and mobile devices have largely been provisioned, employees are increasingly asking for "the same things they had in the office," one participant said. "They started saying things like 'I want three monitors to plug in at home,' or 'How about an office chair?' So we've been dealing with policy stuff and trying to formulate what we should be providing and what we should not."
Employees at that agency have been given headsets, "and they've also been able to go to the office and take their wireless keyboard and mouse home and things like that," the official said. "But when you look at the private sector, they've been giving stipends and providing funding to build your own office."
Another official said: "It's really fine-tuning what telework means, not only from the standpoint of does your position allow you to work full-time from home but then what are the additional tools that you need?"
No telework without telecom
Another unresolved challenge is secure and sufficient connectivity. "The only pain point we had when we had everybody go remote was the bandwidth," one official said. "Because of the Trusted Internet Connections program, everybody had to go to our cloud through our trusted internet connection. And we had to really scale it up."
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