Agencies Need Greater Agility When Designing Workplace IT Solutions
GSA’s second learning was that none of its vendor partners achieved what federal users wanted out of the gate, returning to change some of their offerings. That speaks to a need for greater agility and flexibility in the way agencies design their IT solutions, Hardy says.
For example, whereas one vendor provides virtual private networks, Cisco provides digital whiteboarding and accompanying video analytics, artificial intelligence and reservation technologies.
The WIL’s reservation system is URL-based, and from a digital whiteboard at the concierge desk, visitors can see a map of available offices as well as their temperature, air quality, humidity and noise levels. That data is provided in real time by cameras in the whiteboards, which recognize faces but not who they belong to.
“This is partly to educate to the agencies that are using this to let them know that data can be anonymized,” Hardy says. “We can get good metrics out of something that doesn’t get into any kind of personal information that we want to stay away from.”
Data from Cisco’s whiteboards can be fed into its Spaces platform, which can then be connected to a building management system to automatically control settings such as room temperature, as Cisco does at its PENN1 headquarters in New York City, says Scott Morin, client executive for federal.