Melinda Rogers was faced with navigating the COVID-19 crisis and need to work from home in the early days of her stewardship as the CIO for the Justice Department. She considers it one of her biggest achievements of 2020 that her team successfully transferred the entire DOJ workforce from ânormalâ operations to maximum telework within a previously unimaginably short period of time.
âWithin approximately one week of this massive transformation, the wrinkles were smoothed out with a multipronged approach, which included early engagement with major vendors, doubling telecommunication bandwidth capacity, expanding web conferencing and collaboration platform options, surging end user support and disseminating essential telework guidance information via web portals,â Rogers said.
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Rogers and her team expect to be heavily focused on moving DOJ to a centralized identity model with strong governance, universal multifactor authentication enforcement and encryption, and an adoption of zero trust security protocols.
âAs I like to say, âKnow whoâs who in the zoo,ââ Rogers said. âIt is a rhyme that makes this saying roll off of oneâs tongue, but the sentiment is grounded in the importance of relationships, of picking up the phone and knowing the individuals who collectively support the departmentâs mission.â