Page 44 - FCW, May 2021

FCWPerspectives
Connecting and supporting
the post-pandemic workforce
After a year of emergency response, IT leaders are planning for a permanently changed operating environment
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 page 44 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 tele- work when the mission allows, the par- ticipants 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 — particu- larly if you’re assuming that there’s always going to be a remote presence in that collaboration.”
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 col- laboration “also affects document man- agement 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 prog- ress. “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 environ- ment 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 pres- ence — 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
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