Podcast: CIO Crossroads – Education Edition

Federal IT has proven its value as the vital lifeline between government and citizen service during the COVID-19 pandemic. MeriTalk is chronicling the untold stories of how Federal IT is getting the job done – and lessons for the road to recovery. Our latest chapter of CIO Crossroads explores IT operations at the Department of Education.
Timely Modernization Clinches ‘Team Education’ Pandemic Performance
The Education Department’s reach into all corners of the American landscape is rivaled by few Federal agencies. And its mission – fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access so that all students can reach their highest potential – helps form the very foundation of the country’s future.
Executing on that mission relies on policy making, relationships with thousands of educational systems, and distribution of billions in financial assistance. When the coronavirus pandemic roared onto the national landscape in mid-semester and forced schools to take online cover, the stakes could not have been higher.
In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, Education Department CIO Jason Gray explains how the agency aced the pandemic test by leveraging the fruit of an IT modernization push that began in 2017. Those efforts allowed the agency to move to 100 percent telework in a matter of days and distribute $31 billion of stimulus funding over a period of weeks.
Along the way, the agency undertook a dramatic VPN capacity expansion, upgraded key cloud hosting infrastructure over a weekend, reworked Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) systems in less than a week to onboard several hundred new employees, and notched a six-fold increase in online collaboration tools use. We invited Gray to school us on how his team did it.
MeriTalk: Can you provide some metrics to illustrate the success of your work during the pandemic that tie to the Education Department’s missions? What’s the story of the last four months by the numbers?
Gray: Our IT organization is focused on service delivery to enable people to accomplish their mission. Prior to the pandemic, we were averaging 20 to 25 percent VPN utilization for the whole department. Now, after COVID hit and we moved to 100 percent telework, we are in the upper 90 percent range for VPN utilization. That was a massive jump, and it literally happened over a weekend.
But all of the buildup to accomplish that was years in the making. In 2017 we worked very hard on our modernization strategy, roadmap, and plan. We started executing that plan in May of last year, and we finished a massive modernization effort that allowed us to adapt very quickly this year.
In a few short weeks during the pandemic, the department was able to send out close to $31 billion of stimulus funding, all while working 100 percent remotely. The department was prepared to continue its mission, regardless of whether employees were in the office or not.
Our use of online collaboration tools prior to the pandemic averaged around 60,000 calls per month. Now we are averaging over 370,000 calls per month. We have also been able to onboard new employees during the shutdown, and we were able to come up with a solution for that very quickly. I am very proud of the team for being able to do so.
The rapid transition of our team – meaning Team Education – to a 100 percent remote environment is pretty significant.
MeriTalk: Can you share some details about managing the VPN capacity?
Gray: We have not only doubled the capacity that we could have from a VPN, but also have ensured that we have a fault tolerance which would actually triple our VPN capacity. We have multiple sites that are providing our VPN services, and the team has done a great job ensuring that if one of those sites goes down, we could still provide VPN services to the department.