Page 104 - FCW, August 2021

FCWPerspectives rules for everybody. And then you’re
going to lose staff to places where it’s more telework friendly. Same with the staff that you’re trying to attract or the contractors you’re trying to hire.”
At least two participants said they’d begun hiring contractors without
regard to location, after long requiring those individuals to be locally based. And one noted that hiring government employees nationwide for remote work not only tapped new talent pools, but also made it easier to find qualified veterans hire — something federal agencies are expected to do.
In many organizations, however, the support for a permanently flex- ible work environment appears shaky at best.
“We closed our doors for three months last year, and then did a par- tial opening and had staff working remotely,” one participant said. “We did a full return to work in late April of this year. So it’ll be interesting to see if these telework policies are rewrit- ten so that people can work remotely. It may not really happen until there’s new leadership.”
“Our senior leadership is still not used to people working from home,” another official agreed. “They’re kind of, ‘You’re working if your feet are under your desk.’ That’s how they think of things. Even though people have proven that we can do things remotely.”
Some of the participants were more optimistic. “We’re seeing a blend of how can we mesh the two worlds,” one said. “We do have some folks that are looking to go back and do the stand-ups, the early-morning rigor. But at the same time, during the pan- demic you’ve seen the balance of fam- ily life, personal time, taking time for yourself. And so I think that it’s going tohavetobeablend—andaswith anything, we’ll merge the worlds together and come out with the best.”
New normal, new security concerns
After years of battling shadow IT in the office, the group agreed, a year- plus of telework has opened up new fronts in that struggle.
“How many of you have had a call to your help desk,” one participant asked the group, “from someone
who says, ‘I just went to Costco and bought a printer now that I’m not coming to the office. And I need the IT office to hook it up.’” Virtually every head nodded yes.
“And then if your team is sharp, you start getting into a discussion about supply chain management and where that printer came from and its capabilities,” the speaker continued. “We are going to come up with a list of probably five printers that we will support offices buying for home users, that we will provide the drivers for those. We will make sure that the supply chain for them is proper. We might even designate that they only can buy them through NASA SEWP or something like that, so that we can control the supply chain.”
All the working from home has set new expectations, another official agreed. “Because we’ve been doing so much outside of work with tele- health and other things, people just have this false set of expectations for their everyday work life. And it’s much more complicated, especially in the government, as it’s not as easy and agile to be able to implement those types of solutions.”
But there may be risk manage- ment upsides as well, another offi- cial noted. “You’ve seen in disaster movies the concentrated operations, right? Where we pick up the leader- ship of the Pentagon in the event of a nuclear strike and put them in the middle of a mountain somewhere to operate? I believe we have way more resilience by putting people at home because we distribute the leadership instead of concentrating them in one place.”
“We have more resiliency to a natural disaster, more resiliency to a delivered attack, more resiliency to a cyber event than we would if we were putting them on a single string of servers on a single location. And so we’ve just got to fundamentally rethink all of that.” n
Participants
Shane Barney
Chief Information Security Officer, Department of Homeland Security
Winston Beauchamp
Deputy CIO, Department of the Air Force
Guy Cavallo
Deputy Chief Information Officer, Office of Personnel Management
Lou Charlier
Deputy CIO, Department of Labor
La’Naia Jones
Deputy CIO, National Security Agency
Heather Kowalski
CIO, INTERPOL-USNCB, Department of Justice
Kimberly LaGrue
CIO, City of New Orleans
Jonathan Nguyen-Duy
Vice President and Field Chief Information Security Officer, Fortinet
Eric Quinn
Director, Global IT Modernization, Department of State
Jim Richberg
Field Chief Information Security Officer, Fortinet
Christophe St. Luce
Chief Information Officer, City of Venice (Fla.)
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy
K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The June 17 gathering was underwritten by Fortinet,
but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither the sponsors nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their June 17 comments.
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