Vaughn Noga
CIO, Environmental Protection Agency
In 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency’s IT team retooled how it managed, monitored and secured endpoint technologies for a workforce almost entirely remote and off network.
“Not only did we accomplish what we set out to accomplish before COVID-19, but we were also compelled to reimagine the delivery of IT services, end-user training, collaboration capabilities and cybersecurity,” Vaughn Noga said. “We leaned into the challenges of this new normal and rapidly evolved our capabilities. This reimagination will forever change how we execute our mission support responsibilities.”
Within a month of transitioning to telework, the agency convened a workgroup to develop remote equipment configuration and deployment procedures.
Under Noga’s guidance, the agency rapidly transitioned to a Microsoft Teams video conferencing and collaboration suite. By the close of the year, the team had successfully trained more than 8,000 employees and achieved a 90% use rate across the agency.
The agency’s efforts resulted in not only maintaining its FITARA score, but improving it over the last two reporting periods.
“The EPA has an awesome mission — ‘Protecting Human Health and the Environment’ — and enabling the EPA workforce to support that mission is job No. 1,” Noga said.
Why Watch
Looking forward, Noga will work toward moving EPA away from paper-based business processes and into a fully digital and digitized workplace, including plans to meet a December 2022 deadline to manage temporary and permanent records electronically.
“We embraced the opportunity to dramatically transform how the business of EPA is accomplished — success is now measured in weeks and months, not years,” he said.
Colleagues and external stakeholders will be engaged to help identify opportunities to make it easier for agency employees to get their jobs done — through business process re-engineering initiatives, expanded collaboration/training capabilities and IT and application optimization initiatives.