During the COVID-19 pandemic, Federal IT operations are providing a resilient fabric that enables accelerated delivery of vital services to citizens during an unprecedented public health crisis. As government IT operations reach their new steady-state and map the path to further modernization, MeriTalk is surfacing the untold stories – and lessons – of those efforts. In the latest installment of CIO Crossroads, we examine the Labor Department’s performance eight weeks into the fray.
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Labor’s Lessons: Modernize Early and Often – CIO Q&A
There’s no hard-and-fast rule book for how to go above and beyond during a national crisis. But after speaking with Labor Department CIO Gundeep Ahluwalia, it’s clear that the agency’s pandemic response is a marathon, not a sprint, and that having the foresight to make significant investments in cloud and infrastructure modernization had a huge mission impact.
Labor oversees Federal administration of myriad workforce areas – unemployment insurance benefits, occupational health, wage and hour standards, and economic statistics. Its role plugs the agency squarely into the currently fractured employment landscape, and into the path to eventual recovery.
Labor was able to quickly shift to 95 percent telework by investing in the cloud (recently migrating 23 mission applications), doubling its VPN capacity, and partnering with industry to get pre-imaged laptops to employees working at home.
That agility translated to rapid mission impact during the pandemic response. Labor rushed technical assistance to numerous states whose unemployment claim systems are overwhelmed. It went electronic with systems that approve 100,000 foreign labor applications for seasonal workers – keeping store shelves stocked and helping prevent a labor shortage that would further devastate the economy. The agency’s prior investments in cloud and infrastructure modernization allowed it to easily handle immense surges in website traffic – including a 300 percent increase in page views on family medical leave, a 340 percent increase on disaster assistance, and a 20 times increase in traffic for benefits information – to continue providing service to citizens in need without blinking an eye.
Please join us for an in-depth conversation with Ahluwalia as he explains Labor’s greatest IT lesson: modernize as quickly as possible to get ready for the unexpected.
MeriTalk: What are your largest priorities and successes during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are you proudest of, and what have been the biggest surprises?
Ahluwalia: We are currently at about 95 percent telework, and a lot of that success stems from infrastructure improvements that we’ve been able to make in the last two years. We moved 23 of our mission applications into the cloud. We created a new VPN environment that has more than doubled capacity – even at 95 percent telework, we were at only 35 percent of VPN capacity.
We have authorized 20,000-plus laptops for the entire department, and they all run Windows 10. In doing so, we set up 12 distribution centers across the country, and all of these have a spare pool of six to 10 percent.
We were the first to set up a direct VPN connection with Dell and imaging infrastructure at Dell’s factory. So now our computers are coming pre-imaged from Dell, which helped us on-board 42 wage and hour investigators over the last week – they received their pre-imaged computer at home.
We invested in [Microsoft] OneDrive and moved off all local storage so everyone could still get their files when working offsite. For us, our Windows 10 laptop upgrade was a productivity play, not an infrastructure play. In addition to OneDrive, we implemented a digital signature, Cisco Jabber, and Skype – all of which helped greatly when COVID-19 happened.