I want to share the experience of my department as a member of the Department of Defense working as a civilian for the Air Force. It’s always been a problem that infrastructure doesn’t meet the demand for efficiency. Generally it’s been thought that there is nothing we can do about it and if a 15 minute online training takes Two hours because of the lack of Internet broadband that is just what we have to deal with. That’s just one example that is at the lowest level of the impact of an overloaded network. The real problem is 1000 times worse. Then we were hit with the pandemic and we saw that working from home showed us that we were able to work efficiently on our personal Internet. Now I understand that there’s optics involved in creating future trust in Government Employees, however we are now less efficient.
I would recommend that the telework order be recalled until the infrastructure of all Federal agencies are up to the same standards and speed that we have been able to accomplish remotely.
Understand that I am not in a position that I can regularly telework. I am always on site. My problem is that now that our network is overloaded I am not longer in the same position I was then. My time to get my tasks done is no longer achieved. The network is unstable and many people have lost hours of work due to outages.
President Trump I know has been able in building his past working wherever he was. That’s really the way the world is going these days. Accomplishments should be judged on timelines and delivery not on the location of the people who do the work.
I ask for a study of not just timelines missed due to the change but also the difference in energy consumption and environmental costs for the different times over the past five years.
Our organization realized that projects were completed quicker. I think that this comes down to basic communication. When we used email to communicate we read and responded to the job at hand. A conversation in the office takes longer due to the nature of communication. Topic change and distraction.
It’s time to figure out how to at least pay for the infrastructure change of every federal agency. Upgrade to fiber. In the meantime a balance should be reviewed.
I agree to update to fiber as it is pretty much the standard now-a-days, but I disagree for the desire for more money when it seems like a common occurence of allocating funding is sent to other projects and resources and not directly for its intended purpose by the agencies and its leaders. I think there needs to be more oversight or accountability in this area. That’s my hot take as an outside-observer without knowing how things are run, how they can be optimized, and how the flow of beurocracy works.