Page 52 - FCW, May/June 2020

FirstPerson
From 12 to 12,000 in two weeks
The Los Angeles Information Technology Agency quickly scaled up a platform that gives remote employees access to all their in-office resources
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
As governors and city leaders issued shelter-in-place orders
to limit the spread of the coronavirus, some government employees found they still needed to go into the office to do their jobs. That didn’t have to be the case, though.
With some quick planning, Los Angeles CIO Ted Ross and his team at the Information Technology Agency set up a platform to accommodate teleworking for many of the
city government’s 50,000 employees. The effort is based on Connect2LACity.org, a website that helps workers access Google mail and calendars, connect to their office computers, set up applications on their city-issued smartphones, and learn how to telework effectively.
FCW spoke with Ross about how his team accomplished so much
in such a short amount of time. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did the telework situation evolve in Los Angeles?
On March 13, we had 12 people working on Connect2LACity. We were given shelter-at-home orders on March 18, and formal orders came down for city employees to start telecommuting wherever possible. On March 20, we had 2,159 people on the platform, and by April 1, we’ve got 11,600 people processed. To use March 31 for an example, we had almost 5,000 people working at the same time at one point during the day.
This is full capability. This is the ability to effectively access all of the same shared drives, apps and tools that they access at work. The intent is to make sure that they’re an effec- tive workforce from home.
How were you able to ramp up so quickly?
It started off first with brainstorming meetings. We sat down infrastruc- ture, application, management and other staff and said, “Listen, if we need to support the telecommut-
ing of over 15,000 employees, how would we do it?”
cept. We demonstrated to everybody what we thought it would look like and how it would work. We had to do levels of testing to ensure that we could scale because, like I said, we’re here to support 15,000 to 20,000 tele- commuters. Then we had to work through the process: How would all this work? How would we commu- nicate this? What kinds of tools and what kinds of resources do we have?
Have you had any bandwidth challenges?
There is the bandwidth that we need to be able to traverse the city network, and we’ve been doing fine with that. We monitor it proactively. Then there’s also bandwidth to the homes of the employees, and some- times that can have issues.
We actually had a couple of days in which a major home internet provider was saying that they were having issues with some of their bandwidth, and it was affecting some of our employees. It’s interesting to see that with mass telecommuting, it’s not just infrastructure that you support, it’s infrastructure that others support.
46 May/June 2020 FCW.COM
We started off with proofs of con-