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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 formu- late 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 sec- tor, 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 posi- tion 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 se- cure and sufficient connectivity. “The only pain point we had when we had everybody go remote was the band- width,” one official said. “Because of the Trusted Internet Connections pro-
gram, everybody had to go to our cloud through our trusted internet connec- tion. And we had to really scale it up.”
That experience was not uncom- mon, another official said, and “some agencies were waiting on the TIC remote-user use case to be released for the acquisition process to start.”
With the increased importance of videoconferencing and real-time document sharing, another said, “we need to drive forward to Class 5 rout- ing. If you’re really going to want to have some people audio, some people video and assemble the workforce on multiple security planes, maybe direct dialing is one of the aspects we really need to get to empower the workforce. It’s one of the deficiencies that we’re trying to prioritize.”
“You can’t have telework without a focus on telecom,” another official said. “And the federal space especial- ly has allowed itself to be almost in vendor lock with small office building- based solutions that CIOs traditionally have a very hard time federating across the physical space and virtual space. I think it’s time the federal govern-
ment starts to follow the commercial example for centralized carrier-based telecom solutions and away from these small office PBX exchanges. It’s about 10 years behind the interoperability and open standards of the transport layer. It’s long overdue.”
“The workforce has shifted from inside-the-building-out to outside- the-building-in, and we spent decades hardening the building and compart- mentalizing all our information,” anoth- er official said. “As you start to merge the application layer, there are strict prohibitions to video, for example. And as we collapse the edge, we’re finding a lot of incompatibility, and we’re excluding our workforce. So our roadmap is to really focus on what’s an inside-the-building versus an outside- the-building mission and try to enable those efforts.”
There are also specific processes, such as digital signatures, that continue to cause friction. “We have a remote desktop that you can log into and do digital signatures,” one participant said. “We can’t do digital signatures virtually, and that’s been a big problem, espe-
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