Page 53 - FCW, May/June 2020

Making some of our
work tools secure and accessible anytime anywhere is a really important lesson
for how modern government needs to operate.
Are employees using their own equipment?
Yes, they are. We knew it
would be impossible to
order enough laptops to
hand out to people, and
one thing we’ve learned
about telecommuting is
it’s not about the hard-
ware. It’s really about the
software and security. It
was about taking advantage of those capabilities that people already had at home.
So, yes, we are leveraging people’s home internet, we are leveraging people’s home computers, and we are using the kinds of tools that have minimal impact on their desktops or laptops.
How are you managing security?
We made sure to establish a plat- form that had security through and through — everything from multi- factor authentication to ensure that it’s truly you who’s logging in, all the way down to encryption at rest and in transit when it comes to your connecting with the city of LA and with our applications. We actually
are proactively monitoring to make sure that departments are not using insecure methods.
Did you already have continuity- of-operations plans in place
that you could build on?
We had plans. I don’t think we had tools. Coronavirus is a terrible thing, but it is testing our ability to use technology remotely — our abil-
ity to run call centers, our ability to run council and commission meet- ings, our ability to process business licenses and permits. Now we’re forced to modernize our technology and modernize our processes.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and we need to run a city with as many
telecommuters as possible to prevent the spread of
the virus. It’s allowing us to invent and build the solu- tions that, honestly, we prob- ably should have always had.
What key lessons have you and other city leaders learned from this experience?
I think it’s clearly shown us how much you can accomplish through telework. I would venture to say that as a city and as an organization, we would more seriously consider telecommuting and teleworking as a part of our lifestyle.
I think another takeaway is a reminder about how important it is to build virtual tools and capabilities that allow you to separate where you are from what you can do because it’s really very old-fashioned to think that you have to be physi- cally in a place to access some of your work tools. Making some of our work tools secure and acces- sible anytime anywhere is a really important lesson for how modern government needs to operate. ■
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