State services, of course, have never ceased — but how they’re accessed and where state staffers are working have changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. And in a conversation at the California Virtual Public Sector CIO Academy 2021, executives were adamant that, in the words of Keson Khieu, chief information officer for the California Emergency Medical Services Authority, “teleworking is not going to go away any time soon.” Among the takeaways:
- Khieu, who talked last year with Techwire about his role, said Wednesday that he and his team are “preparing for a hybrid environment,” but he expects that some face-to-face business will resume. Having said that, his organization changed how it connects to the network, how its firewalls work — and they’re about to do away with desk phones entirely — to make sure staff can work where they are. “We will have conference software, we will have firewall in the sky, so I am fully prepared for our customers to work anywhere in the world,” Khieu said.
- The past should be gone forever, Scott Gregory, deputy director of technology for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), said during a panel discussion of “Crisis Response, Recovery, and Resilience.” “I don’t think we can afford to go back to how things were,” Gregory said, pointing out that he worked at his “kitchen table” during time in the private sector and found it just as effective as being at headquarters. But a culture change has to accompany that, he said, to ensure the work product is judged on its merits and not on whether its creators were actually at their desks in an office somewhere. Security is key as well, said Gregory, who was the state’s chief technology innovation officer before assuming his current role in July. CAL FIRE, he noted, has 21 “geographically based units” around the state, all of which are now effectively remote — changing the attack surface significantly. Asked about working with the private sector, Gregory said his department fields “a lot of ideas, a lot of questions and challenges from a variety of sources” and is always considering how best to create “real information” from a variety of data. Yes, he said, “we’re interested in hearing ideas and yes, we’re willing to play.”
- His entity “will be moving to distributed workforce,” said Brian Wong, chief deputy director for the Office of Systems Integration in the California Health and Human Services Agency, indicating he anticipates 75 percent of the workforce being remote on any given day. This may mean a “smaller physical footprint” for the entity; and “hopefully what we’ll see is also an increased investment in security.” The new era, he said, will bring with it new security challenges.
“I would recommend that each of you go back to your organizations and make sure that you’re doing whatever — I’ll call it cleanup activities — for your infrastructure, looking back at some of the changes that you’ve made in response to the pandemic. And just making sure that if those were temporary changes and you don’t need them anymore, roll back,” Wong said, adding that if it’s something that should be more permanent, consider whether it meets your needs or should be updated. - Asked during Q&A whether there’s a move toward “democratization of technology,” Wong said he doesn’t think one size fits all. There’s “great opportunity” in automation tools and low-code or no-code solutions — but opportunities still remain for custom development. It just depends, he said, on the situation.
