8CIOReview | | MARCH 2022IN MY OPINIONHOW DO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES PERFORM SYSTEM UPGRADES WHILE WORKING REMOTE?By Sean Finley, IT Director - Office of the Assessor-Recorder, City & County of San FranciscoBackgroundIn March of 2020 the San Francisco Assessor Recorder, like every else was hit with the task of transforming to a completely remote work force. We had over 200 staff and only a few dozen who had ever worked remote before. We also faced another challenge; we had projects in motion to upgrade our two main systems (Assessor and Recorder) as they were both over 20 years old and we had to stay on track. We thought this was a recipe for disaster.The property tax assessment system is responsible for tracking the assessed value for all property in San Francisco (total transfer tax revenue in 2020 was $335M). The recorder system supports official record keeping (managing over 150,000 official records annually including deeds, marriage certificates etc.).Because we were: (1) losing revenue in other City agencies;and (2) money was being redirected to relief efforts it became imperative that our projects were a success. While all new IT projects were "on hold" we had to remain on schedule. San Francisco depended on the revenue being generated by our systems.Challenges and SolutionOur first technical challenge was to get our remote workers access to their systems. Luckily, our leaders had thought of this a few weeks pre-pandemic so we had a few days to prepare for the demands we needed to meet. Providing access to our legacy Assessor and Recorder systems required access to desktops within the walls in City Hall we had was no remote access or virtualization as our systems were too old. We had to setup each employee with VPN accounts and teach them how to remote into their office computers. Not surprisingly, our user base consisted largely of long-term employees who were averse to changes in technology and had never worked from home. This required us to involve all aspects of the Department including our PMO, HR, Administrative and Operations teamsin the solution as well as support from the
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