More than half the federal government IT employees responding to a recent survey say they are worried their IT systems will struggle to deliver good user experiences as more agency employees return to working in offices instead of remotely, according to a new survey released by Riverbed.
Among survey respondents who are concerned with end-user experience in a hybrid work environment, 52% of those are concerned that their legacy IT architectures and on-premises network infrastructure will struggle with the increased usage of collaboration tools such as Teams and Zoom as workers return to the office, and 44% are concerned that the end user experience on-site won’t be as good as at home.
These concerns arise as the concept of “government from anywhere,” whether in an on-site or hybrid capacity, is becoming widely accepted. Of those surveyed, 47% expect hybrid work environments (teleworking 2-4 days a week) to continue for the long-term, while only 30% expect that a majority of employees will return to the office fulltime in the next six months.
The survey of IT employees across the U.S. federal government, from both civilian and defense agencies, was conducted by research firm Market Connections.
Survey respondents also reported that they rely on reactive, manual methods to quantify problems with user, infrastructure, and application experiences. While 100 percent of respondents agree that it is at least somewhat important to measure end user experience and productivity capability, 87% claim their agency is still reactively responding to help desk tickets and 51% rely upon user phone calls as a primary means of quantifying issues.
“These survey findings point to the importance of utilizing proactive monitoring tools that provide complete network visibility to improve the user experience and network performance across an agency’s entire IT environment,” said Craig McCullough, Senior Vice President of Public Sector for Riverbed. “As agencies balance their various work environments and collaboration tools, they should seek to implement an observability platform that multiple teams can use to proactively identify and contextually analyze user issues and leverage automation to solve them quickly.”
According to the survey, most agencies surveyed (59%) aren’t effectively measuring the impact of change in their IT environment, and are not examining business transaction productivity in terms of labor cost, latency impact, or rate of success. Issues of user experience and productivity and IT network performance can be successfully addressed by utilizing a single-platform, proactive, monitoring tool that provides end-to-end network visibility. With full visibility, IT and agency leaders can quickly identify, mitigate and resolve issues across a variety of endpoints through one integrated system.
“This is significant because without a single performance platform, agencies don’t have consolidated incident-centric end-to-end context, root cause analysis, or automated response,” stated Monty Deel, Chief Executive Officer for Swish. “Unified observability should be at the forefront of agency thinking and we and our partners, like Riverbed, are working to support this mentality shift which will ultimately benefit the government for years to come.”
Swish is a provider of technology solutions and engineering services to the U.S. Federal Government with a focus on high-quality outcomes for customers.
Experienced and certified engineers research and evaluate the most innovative technologies on the market and then develop full life cycle solution offerings to ensure that customers realize maximum operational value.
Since 2006, Swish has delivered high-performance solutions and services to the Federal Government market ensuring that customer’s digital service capabilities, performance and security exceed expectations and requirements. Swish is a Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned and HUBZone certified Small Business.
