Page 103 - FCW, August 2021

to understand that you came from an organization that has an IT team bigger than our entire organization. We simply cannot replicate what that other group does. We don’t have the budget. We don’t have the time.”
And even where CIOs are now seen as a valued voice, the help-desk image persists. “We are a policy and strategy and enterprise architecture shop,” one participant said, “but I still get calls from our front office saying, ‘Hey, can we get some tablets? So we can look at PowerPoint slides in real time?’ They can hold those two things in their heads somehow at the same time. Yes, we need to talk more about IT, but also just fix my tablet.”
“We’re strategists,” another partici- pant said. “We save the day, but then when the little glitch happens we’re the dogs for the next two days. It’s
something I don’t think we’re ever going to get away from, but I do think that executive management and the administration is now seeing the value in IT, especially when we were able to react so well across the federal work- space to the pandemic.”
Telework and the IT team
The rush to maximum telework did more than showcase the importance of IT, the group agreed. It also forced them to rethink their own operations.
“I think my biggest challenge with trying to figure out how we did tele- work and then how we transitioned to a hybrid model is really how I approach personnel management,” one CIO said. “I’ve got 120 people on my team, and that they range from people who are about to retire,
people who have never been married, people who have small children and are single parents. And I’m trying to maintain an awareness of how that person is going to be able to work. And if I make a snap judgment that, ‘okay, we’re all moving back to the office,’ how is that going to impact people?”
Multiple participants said they were still wrestling the issues surrounding employees who want to move out of the area and transition to remote- worker status — practical questions about particular job functions, HR- related matters like locality pay and basic concerns about fairness and equity across their teams.
“We’re really looking at OPM and others to standardize,” one said, “because if each federal agency does it different, that’s going to change the
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