The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product. Learn more about how Cisco is using Inclusive Language.
Hybrid work is a governmental necessity
The past several years have seen a dramatic transformation in the way governments operate to achieve their mission and business outcomes, especially to deliver services to customers, citizens, and residents. One of the most fundamental shifts has been the adoption of hybrid work.
Originally embraced to ensure the continued delivery of essential government services during the pandemic, hybrid work has now become an important tool in addressing the challenges of retaining and stimulating employees. As the desire among workers to be flexible in their location continues to remain strong, government agencies are discovering the benefits not only of continuing to embrace hybrid work but also of enhancing their office hybrid work capabilities. This helps offices evolve into collaboration centers and magnets to stimulate innovation in support of expanding governmental “return-to-work” mandates for meaningful in-person work.
Additionally, the operational resiliency garnered by enabling employees to work from diverse locations establishes an “operate through the crisis” paradigm—whether it be a snowstorm, hurricane, or pandemic. As organizations create this dynamic work foundation, the risks of not being able to securely deliver services in challenging times diminish.
Government leaders across the globe are placing an increasing emphasis on delivering enhanced customer experiences. These initiatives now include enhancing worker experiences as a primary means of enabling and retaining personnel as well as delivering superior and more resilient governmental services.
Government leaders are increasingly recognizing that improving customer and employee experiences through hybrid work is critical to achieving better mission and business outcomes for their organizations while building a modern work environment to better retain their employees.
Optimizing hybrid work performance and experiences requires enhanced enterprise visibility and analytics that can dynamically automate and orchestrate the supporting hybrid work infrastructures.
Foundational elements of hybrid work
Because work is no longer where you go but what you do, the modern hybrid workplace includes not only the traditional office but also the home and any “workspace” an employee contributes from. Government hybrid work requirements, however, are more stringent than in a commercial enterprise.
A government hybrid work environment must provide both secure access and secure collaborative platform capabilities that seamlessly ensure appropriate application and data access. Optimizing user performance and access is central to delivering a workplace environment that is flexible, secure, and more attractive to a modern workforce. Optimized hybrid work performance requires enhanced visibility and analytics that enable dynamic infrastructure automation and orchestration across the enterprise.
With distributed applications and services commonplace today, organizations need to have—and understand—real-time performance visibility across application code, microservices, containers, databases, compute, storage, networking, and security technology stacks. This visibility, coupled with embedded analytics, enables automation and orchestration of all of the technology components and policies that ensure performance optimization and security across this entire delivery infrastructure ecosystem. This results not only in full-stack observability but in the delivery of full-stack optimization, thus enhancing all user experiences. Improving both customer and employee experiences is increasingly recognized by government leaders as a critical aspect in achieving better mission and business outcomes for their organizations.
Cisco® solutions enable government organizations to empower their hybrid workforces with secure access and collaboration from anywhere employees work from, using high-quality video conferencing with multistream, high-definition audio and video from any device—desktop, mobile, or web—with Webex®. In addition, Cisco is a leader in transforming workspaces by unifying networking, security, and collaboration to safeguard health and well-being, as well as supporting enhanced safety and greater efficiencies.
Security is absolutely essential for government hybrid work. Cisco offers the most secure end-to-end encryption in the market, fully integrated across the entire Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Webex Suite, including Webex Messaging, Meetings, Webinars, and Calling. Every voice call, video call, file share, screen share, and text chat remains fully encrypted throughout its lifecycle. Webex is now a true collaboration platform with the ability to embed workflows and applications, as well as tightly integrating them with other government investments to better meet mission needs. Webex also provides a single pane of glass for administration and uses real-time analytics and intelligent troubleshooting to provide superior visibility and more rapidly resolve issues. This unified user experience delivers a highly flexible, inclusive, secure, and economical collaboration solution for hybrid government workforces.
“Designed-in” cross-channel security that is encrypted and integrated is essential to ensuring security resiliency and optimized hybrid work capabilities for governments.
Cisco’s secure government FedRAMP Webex Suite hybrid work solution is available in the United States, and similar secure hybrid work capabilities can be delivered from sovereign platforms in other countries.
Improving hybrid work outcomes
Agencies taking a holistic approach to hybrid work often begin by securing and improving their information technology and network infrastructures. Having a robust and resilient infrastructure provides the foundation for delivering more effective and responsive digital services through hybrid work. Employees are also empowered through flexible collaborative platforms that expand the opportunity for improved productivity and efficient, impactful work to take place. This flexibility improves the ability to attract potential candidates while better enabling the capability to up-skill employees for higher-value work. A flexible and dynamic workforce creates a culture that helps to break down departmental silos, resulting in better cross-agency and cross-departmental collaboration and improved operational efficiencies and effectiveness, especially with a growing “return-to-office” emphasis.
As the modern work environment continues to evolve, governments are accelerating their adoption and deployment of collaborative technologies to deliver more advanced and effective services to their residents, enhance customer and worker experiences, optimize productivity, and more effectively compete for workers in increasingly competitive labor markets. Eighty-nine percent of surveyed CIO and IT leaders identified consistent application performance across both application and supporting infrastructures as key to driving a great user experience.1 Improving employee experience and productivity results in an increased ability to retain top talent and reach into an ever-broader talent pool that can help deliver greater organizational efficiency, agility, inclusiveness, and organizational resiliency, as well as delivering superior services to their communities.
Delivering better hybrid work results
A holistic, end-to-end architectural approach to hybrid work not only improves both customer and worker experiences but is also a key enabler for helping to:
● Optimize employee productivity
● Support dynamic learning
● Optimize infrastructure
● Attract and retain top talent
● Enhance employee health and safety
● Transform IT operations
● Deliver enhanced enterprise security
● Unify automation and orchestration
● Better engage diverse talent pools
● Extend enterprise visibility and analytics
A comprehensive government hybrid work environment enables the delivery of superior services, the retention of skilled employees, and improved mission and business results.
Reach out to Cisco for an in-depth discussion on how our solutions can optimize and modernize your hybrid work environment to help you deliver better mission and business outcomes for your organization.
The federal Office of Management and Budget’s latest workplace guidance (M-23-15, dated April 13, 2023) recognizes that agency work environments are evolving and focuses on improving “an organization’s effectiveness in delivering mission-aligned results.” Government entities that understand the importance of embracing this modern, flexible work environment across all locations where work is done could potentially create a new government workplace culture that integrates hybrid work to serve as a catalyst for enhancing mission and business outcomes in their agencies and communities.
Leaders that embrace the opportunities presented by this hybrid work transformation can increase innovation, deliver infrastructure optimization and resiliency, offer more equitable access to critical services, and reimagine their communities.
Cisco looks forward to engaging with our government clients to make your hybrid work, work better.
To learn more about government and technology, visit cisco.com/go/government, and to learn more about hybrid work, visit cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/industries/government/hybridwork.html.