Remote Work Spawns Workarounds — and Opportunities

City technology leaders from across California gathered virtually Wednesday to compare notes and share experiences on remote work, the return to the office and how the COVID-19 pandemic may be changing the nature of how IT is sold to government.

The webinar, “MISAC Cyber Cities: Return to Work,” was sponsored by the Municipal Information Systems Association of California and the California Cybersecurity Institute at Cal Poly State University. It was one in a series of online MISAC sessions in which public-sector IT leaders convene to share strategies and advice.

As municipal staffers are increasingly working remotely, those involved in procurement are looking beyond their own geographic areas more often when buying IT goods and services.

“Some vendors that maybe used to have to be local to provide consulting services or whatever – that’s not the case anymore,” said panelist Kevin Gray, the chief information officer for the city of Burbank. “As an example, when we worked on our new website, we worked with a design firm from New York that had a visual design artist from SF, and the city that actually built the platform was out of Pasadena, but we’re serving it out of Northern California. So we were able to work with people that we might not have been able to work with before. So that’s where some opportunity is coming in for vendors.”

Looking at it from the other side, Kurtis Franklin, IT manager for the Inland Regional Center, said that as public entities and nonprofits need broader choices in equipping and training employees to work remotely, those vendors selling goods and services must adapt their offerings accordingly – or be left behind.

“If we stick with this idea of remote-first … anything that does come up where there’s a component or a piece that does have some sort of requirement or high reliance on something being on-site or on-prem, or configured just-so, or only can work in certain circumstances if you’re not there, will probably be an easy way for us to weed out certain types of technology,” Franklin said.

Panelists agreed that the remote-work shift has gone from what they thought would be a temporary accommodation to a new way of equipping and managing a remote workforce.

Government agencies, Franklin said, will be looking for some different hardware needs – fewer, if any desktop computers, replaced by laptops; as well as more headsets, keyboards, large monitors and other peripherals.

Burbank’s Gray noted that tech companies should also remember that as workers use a variety of devices and online platforms, their software needs may change to be more adaptable.

Panelist Donald Hester, the city of Livermore’s cybersecurity manager, said much of his city workforce went remote well before the pandemic shift and wasn’t in the same predicament as many other governments, trying to buy thousands of laptops last spring and summer.

Fresno’s cybersecurity manager, Christopher Damron, said his city had already been transitioning more employees to remote work when the pandemic struck last spring, and cybersecurity was his focus.

“That began with, ‘There’s this large group; how do we handle that?’” Damrom said. “Our VPN, for example, was not accessible on noncorporate devices, and not everyone had a laptop at the time. We were, kind of fortunately, being in the middle of onboarding a third-party vendor,” so the workaround that was devised to allow the vendor the access it needed helped spawn a solution for staffers as well.

Damron said another challenge with a remote workforce was that not everyone left their devices turned on and connected to the VPN after hours – which is when a lot of security upgrades and other work was normally done. The city has also found workarounds for that, he said.

Cal Poly CCI is making a recording of the webinar available through its website.