Most federal employees believe telework is here to stay, but figuring out how to manage information technology systems will be a top challenge for mass federal telework in the long term, according to a survey.
A Science Applications International Corporation survey of 300 federal employees found more than 80% think the pivot to telework will continue into the future, with 82% indicating they expect to work from home three days per week or more in the future.
Mark Forman, a vice president at SAIC, told Nextgov federal agencies will need to move beyond the “triage” mode that enabled a rapid transition to mass telework in the early days of the pandemic to a more durable model for the long haul.
“Looking forward to some of the challenges around cybersecurity, or maintaining the business processes in this virtual or virtual hybrid on-prem environment, we can see clearly the people move from that triage—what we call the response phase—into that recovery phase as they're getting more orderly practices and tools in place,” Forman said.
Beyond preventing the spread of the coronavirus among employees, 77% of survey respondents said a major challenge they face during the ongoing pandemic is managing IT systems for teleworking. Another 75% said detecting fraud, waste and abuse is a critical problem.
Forman is no stranger to government IT transformations. During the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s, he served as the first administrator for E-Government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget.
Traditional government teleworking standards relied on technologies like virtual private networks that allowed employees to tunnel into the office network from home, but these methods weren’t necessarily scalable. “And from the CIO’s perspective, a lot of it was controlled because you didn’t have enough mon ..
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