Podcast: CIO Crossroads – Energy Edition

Federal IT has earned the status of lifesaver in the COVID-19 pandemic for its ability to deliver vital services to citizens in times of crisis. MeriTalk is chronicling those successes – along with lessons for the future as agencies turn to the next generation of service improvements. In this edition of CIO Crossroads, we examine the Department of Energy four months into the fray.
Foresight, Focus Keep the Grid Humming in DoE’s Pandemic Response
For an agency that traces its roots in part to the World War II Manhattan Project, it’s no surprise that mission is paramount. What is less obvious about the Department of Energy (DoE) is the vast scope of its work that touches the lives of every American, and holds the keys to technology advancements that can improve the lives of every future generation.
Here’s a short primer on DoE: broad oversight of the nation’s power grid; management of power marketing administrations totaling 11 percent of U.S. bulk electric power; maintenance of U.S. nuclear weapons facilities; management of environmental cleanup from Cold War nuclear sites; and funding of 17 National Laboratories that make DoE the largest Federal sponsor of physical sciences research pushing the boundaries of basic science with the goal of broad innovation.
In an exclusive interview with MeriTalk, DoE CIO Rocky Campione takes us through one of those missions that could not fail – proper functioning of the U.S. power grid during the pandemic. He credits several years of work by his predecessors that laid the foundation for remote work, quick expansion of VPN and cloud capacity, and the rapid repurposing of laptops as keys in DoE’s shift from 10 percent telework to more than 80 percent without so much as the lights flickering.
At the same time, DoE’s work on big data-driven cybersecurity improvement has continued apace, while the agency is providing supercomputing resources for the new COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that is the muscle behind coronavirus vaccine and treatment development.
MeriTalk: Can you provide some metrics to illustrate the success of your work during the pandemic that tie to Energy’s mission? What is the story of the last three months by the numbers?
Campione: Before the pandemic, we might have had a maximum of 10 percent of our folks working remotely either on telework, or because they were traveling. When we moved to telework because of the pandemic, we had more than 80 percent of our people teleworking. Why not 100 percent? That has to do with mission. In effect, 100 percent of the people who could telework were doing so.
One of the lessons we learned was that even in places involving national security, we could reduce risk with shift work. You don’t want 100 percent of your people in a secure location at one time. If someone got COVID, you knock out your whole workforce.
Anecdotally, people are getting more done from home than they typically would in their regular environment. There is a lot of day-to-day work on the unclassified side that they can run through during the week while working remotely.
MeriTalk: How much work did it take to get to that 80 percent telework mark?
Campione: A lot of that revolved around the good work my predecessor, Max Everett, accomplished as CIO [from 2017 to 2019], and work to improve business operations by Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, who was deputy secretary from 2017 until last year. Over the last three years, the CIO’s office here at headquarters and our IT organizations across the department spent a lot of time developing systems that could enable remote work. The target at the time was about 30 percent. The focus was making sure people can telework within a continuity of operations planning (COOP) environment.
To get to 80 percent, we started in mid-February.