In regards to remote working, the general consensus seems to be, "you can't put the genie back in the bottle."
A good portion of the government workforce has been working from home for the past year, and the world has continued turning. In fact, some agencies report productivity is up since teleworking became the norm. While people will return to the office, it will look different with many alternating office days with days they work from home. The past year has shown us that working arrangements do not necessarily need to be confined to an office. And, when we also remove the stress of students learning from home, caring for homebound elderly parents, and a pandemic in general, employees may realize a new level of balance and job satisfaction.
To support the continued success of remote work, agencies need to shore up the IT that was put in place to simply keep the trains running on time. Some technology was implemented quickly to meet the immediate need, and now is the time to take a hard look at all of those solutions to see if they will scale to meet the long-term reality of a dispersed workforce.
Though the word may be overused, state and local governments are indeed facing unprecedented challenges. Forced to move operations online in response to their own stay-at-home orders, state and local agencies have spent the last year retooling how they serve citizens. They have been paying for necessary technology upgrades and other new equipment while 
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a computer science practice that aims to give computers the ability to understand 
Data helps organizations make more informed decisions about how they serve their customers. Data informs policy and procedures and feeds more personalized interaction with people. But with great power comes vast responsibility. The data that organizations hold can be incredibly personal. It's more than just someone's social security number. It is information about where people live, work, shop, keep their money, get their news, and more. Individuals should have control over who knows this information and, if they do have it, how they use it. However, most of us do little to understand our privacy rights beyond blindly clicking a checkbox that allows sites to collect information about our activities.
The latest Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (
