NASCIO Survey Suggests Remote Work’s Star May Be Fading

In the realm of government IT, remote and hybrid work may be fading in importance — even as it remains common post-pandemic.

In an annual survey from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), 51 IT leaders from U.S. states and territories were asked to rank the top five changes in business processes, practices and investments that they expect to last beyond the pandemic, a question the association has asked for three years in a row.

Expanded remote work options — ranked first in 2020 and second in 2021 — slid all the way to fourth on the list, while increasing prioritization of legacy modernization rose from fifth to second. Digital services remained in first place.

Though remote and hybrid work has become commonplace in all kinds of office environments since March 2020, it has introduced myriad challenges for state and local government. Through the Center for Digital Government’s* annual surveys of jurisdictions across the country, and interviews with CIOs and insights from technology vendors, Government Technology has heard of numerous challenges associated with the sudden shift to remote work, notably including new cybersecurity issues such as personal devices and home networks used to conduct government business.

Texas CIO Amanda Crawford was part of a panel discussion at NASCIO’s annual conference in Louisville, Ky., this week. She said out-of-state hiring is possible for her organization, the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR), but with challenges.

The remote work shift was surprisingly successful for many; with agencies across the country adopting digital tools to handle work they had always completed in person manually. Even if the NASCIO survey suggests some movement against remote work, it also showed that it remains prevalent. When asked what strategies they had used to attract and retain IT workers, 73 percent of survey participants pointed to expanded remote work.

But IT shops continue to face staffing challenges.

Crawford said the most important aspect of hiring is culture. “I think the key thing … is creating a culture that is a strong culture of commitment to the state and public service and also celebrating wins in the public sector.”

In a more forward-looking question, CIOs placed much less importance on telework and more importance on reskilling — a subject that would seem to go hand in hand with legacy modernization. The pandemic illustrated the “fragility” of legacy systems, the NASCIO report stated, creating buy-in from decision-makers on the need to modernize.

“The things we knew inherently in government about what we needed to do to modernize … we had to do it, and we had to do it quickly,” Crawford said. “The important things we’d been preaching as a community suddenly resonated with business leaders.”

*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — Texas’ and Government Technology’s parent company. The original version of this story originally ran in Government Technology.