Tag Archives: government-events

Go Ahead, Call It a Comeback: Outlook for In-Person Events in 2022

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Speaker at Business Conference and Presentation.

As we head towards the end of a second pandemic-influenced year, sports and entertainment facilities are back up to full capacity, albeit with varying levels of mask and vaccine requirements. This holiday season feels a bit more normal, as family gatherings are becoming routine and larger group celebrations are being reintroduced. With this shift to comfort in gathering, we wanted to take the pulse of the government community. As we've done twice before, we reached out to our members to gauge their interest in and readiness for professional events.

At the time of the survey fielding (November 2021), 73% of respondents said they would be comfortable attending an in-person event in 2022. Within this response, we looked at people who had responded "no" to attending in-person events on the last survey (August 2021), and about 50% of those people changed their response to"yes." In August, our survey found only 51% comfortable with attending an in-person event by the end of 2021, a 24% decrease from the responses in May. However, with the most recent rise in readiness back up to 73%, public comfort with in-person events is back to what it was in the spring of 2021.

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If Data is the New Currency, How Are We “Spending” It?

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The government is at no loss for data. And, over the last decade, there has been a concerted effort to use that data more efficiently to improve decision making and service to the citizen. Chief Data Officers are in place across government to shepherd the changes in process and technology needed to achieve the goals set forth in the Federal Data Strategy.

Meeting the Plan to Plan

Department-level data strategies have been borne out of the federal guidance to mature data governance and infrastructure and publish those plans. In fact, the report "CDO Insights: 2021 Survey Results On the Maturation of Data Governance in U.S. Federal Agencies," found that 75 percent of respondents said they had started or completed five of the six action items named in the Federal Data Strategy 2020 Action Plan. The report found that constituting a data governance body (completed by 75%) was the least challenging action. Getting these bodies in place means that beyond department-level plans, some agencies are moving to making plans for critical subsets of data much like the State Department did for geospatial data.

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Monitoring the Readiness for In-Person Events

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In May 2021, shortly after the CDC revised their guidance saying that vaccinated individuals did not need to wear masks, we surveyed our members to get a pulse on their comfort level attending in-person events. At that time, we found that 75% of respondents would be comfortable attending an in-person event in 2021. Size or location (need to travel) did not seem to affect their willingness to attend. Things were looking up for in-person gatherings while enthusiasm for online events also remained high.

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Putting a Value on Trust — Introducing Zero Trust Security Approaches

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With so many high-profile hacks this year, it's easy to want to throw up your hands and say, "Is there nothing that can be trusted?!" Interestingly, that lament is what is driving the latest approach to cybersecurity -- zero trust. Zero trust is what it sounds like, a security approach centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything accessing their systems either inside or outside their perimeters. Instead, all people and devices must be verified before access is granted. To the untrained eye, this seems untenable. How, in this day and age, when we depend on digital information and connection to do most anything, can we use a process where we have to constantly verify identity and access permissions? Luckily, the practice of zero trust is more sophisticated than its premise.

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In-Person Events a “Go” for Government — But Don’t Take Away the Online Option

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This May, after the CDC updated their public health guidance around masking and social distancing for vaccinated individuals, GovEvents surveyed its members to find out what government professionals were comfortable with in terms of in-person events. Feedback from event planners at the beginning of 2021 showed they were beginning to plan toward a hybrid event schedule, looking to introduce in-person events in the late summer or fall. Now that schedule seems to be a reality based both on health guidance and attendee attitudes.

The GovEvents survey of 275+ public sector professionals found that nearly 75% of respondents would be comfortable attending an event in-person sometime in 2021.

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