“It’s a funny time, because you realize there are so many gaps in your COOP even as you’re executing it,” Chief Innovation Officer George Khalil told Techwire in an interview. “We had to find creative solutions.”
The immediate problem was equipping the city workforce to work remotely. That meant acquiring and imaging hardware, imaging it and securing it.
“Having a stock of laptops ready, for example, was nothing we could pull off in a couple of days, so we literally ripped laptops from conference rooms, training rooms – whatever laptops we could find across the city to help our employees to work remotely – and we got a ton of them off site in a very short amount of time, a few days,” said Khalil.
And the award-winning city tech staff had to be agile.
“We had to find creative solutions – for instance, the city has a 311 call center. In the beginning, we actually advised our residents to interact through 311 more as city hall was closed to the public. But then you take a step back, and (realize) you’ve got 50 call center agents sitting on an open floor, near each other, and you’re actually relying on them more and more amid the exposure. So we ended up making some changes in our phone system that allowed them to have a digital call center agent on their laptop, across the VPN, and being able to take calls from home … . We were able to increase safety, maintain social distancing, and still be able to provide service to the public. It was very exciting and innovative.”
No return date has been set, and the city may ultimately move to a staggered schedule whereby an IT staffer may be in the office 60 percent of the time and working remotely 40 percent of the time. As with all IT shops, it’s essential to have some staff physically in the building.
“We’re doing a network refresh,” Khalil said, “and you can’t rack and stack and plug cables in from home. We have a data center DR (disaster recovery) project that we’re working on right now that involves replacing equipment. They have to be there for that.”
Khalil said his help desk team “are really the unsung heroes that got the whole city to be able to execute this.”
One of the keys to a successful remote-work protocol is information security. And for Riverside, that was another time-sensitive challenge. The city has been recruiting on and off for a chief information security officer (CISO) for more than a year. Khalil, in the meantime, has been serving as both. In his five years with the city, he’s been CISO, deputy CIO and now CIO.
“It’s been very difficult to find a qualified CISO who wasn’t already occupied,” he said. “Maybe the timing right now makes a difference. We tried recruiting a year ago, and we had very few candidates. We finally got one, but he dropped out and went to the state.”
As for dealing with vendors in the new remote-working world, Khalil describes the shift from in-person meetings to video calls as “seamless.”
The complications, he said, arise when someone needs to be on site: “We have Iron Mountain that comes in to pick up tapes. How do we create that separation between our employees and foot traffic? That’s how everyone gets exposed. Sp we’re working on a (no-contact) dropoff-pickup model, where we watch from behind glass. But data center maintenance, HVAC maintenance, our network refresh project – our vendors still have to come on site, so there’s still a need for some precautions. They’ll have to be temperature-screened, they’ll still have to maintain face covering, etc.”
So amid all this technological tumult, what should vendors be pitching to Riverside?
“We’ve been discussing DR (disaster recovery) for a long time. We’re ready to start kicking off DR.” And that starts with the city data center.
“The previous thinking was active-standby data center,” he said. “If things fail over, if you lose the primary, you fail over to the secondary. We were starting in the last year and a half designing what that would look like. But then we took a step back and said, ‘Why do we need to pay a million dollars-plus (for) standby equipment? Why don’t we switch the discussion to an active-active data center, leveraging stretch clusters, spanning data across multiple centers, and building that capability to allow us to potentially connect to the cloud and have our own private cloud with a plug-in to allow us to extend to a public cloud? We need to make it ready, as a transitory step, to give us disaster recovery, leverage all the hardware we have rather than under-utilize it, and then give us a way out into the cloud if we want to move that way five years from now.”
So does Khalil expect to be the Riverside CIO five years from now?
“I would hope so,” he said with a laugh. “I like the city, and I broke through that two- or three-year itch.”
