From its very first days, the federal government has been no stranger to picking up stakes and moving; between 1785 and 1800, the capital itself was located in three different cities.
Today’s moves happen both between states and between floors of an office building, and they happen with regularity. In fact, relocation is so much a part of the lifecycle of a federal enterprise that the General Services Administration offers relocation services to its fellow agencies.
The Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure process (BRAC) has closed or relocated hundreds of Cold War–era facilities since 1988, and civilian agencies have also been on the move. The Patent and Trademark Office moved to new headquarters in 2003 and added regional offices outside Washington, D.C., between 2012 and 2015; the National Science Foundation moved into a new building in 2017.
Agencies planning or recently completing moves include the Federal Communications Commission, the Bureau of Land Management and parts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA agencies recently scheduled a virtual job fair to fill vacancies in their new Kansas City location.
But what does it mean to move in the information age? “I’ve been doing this for the past 20-plus years, and I think that technology has honestly gotten simpler from a relocation perspective,” says Eric Stang, senior managing director of CBRE’s Business Transition and Move Management team.
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Agencies Need to Plan in Advance for Major Office Moves
“Most of our clients are in a plug-and-play environment or have the ability to access wireless in the space even if we have a connectivity issue at the desktop,” explains Stang, who has planned and executed large-scale, complex moves for public and private sector clients.
“VoIP phones or a cellphone-only environment eliminates a lot of that upfront planning and telecom work that we used to have to do with our clients’ technology partners.”
Major moves, however, do require major planning. “We still start projects, depending on the size, anywhere from 12 months to 18 months before a large headquarters-type relocation,” says Stang.
One of the biggest challenges during that long ramp-up cycle is understanding every aspect of an agency’s current technology as well as any changes that will be made in conjunction with the move. And, when it comes to government, the procurement process is another consideration that can’t be overlooked, says Stang. Ultimately, the goal is to make the move as seamless as possible and avoid disrupting the services people rely on.
That goal was top of mind when the National Science Foundation moved 8 miles from its original Arlington, Va., headquarters to a new building in Alexandria, Va., in stages between 2016 and 2017. The move involved 1,700 personnel, NSF’s network, a small data center, every piece of IT equipment and the agency’s IT help desk.
“Continuity of service was probably our biggest concern,” says Dorothy Aronson, NSF CIO. “Basically, every piece of headquarters technology needed to move.”
And that had to happen while continuing to serve customers, save money and shrink the agency’s on-premises data center. While NSF’s move was a major challenge, it also became a source of opportunity.
“The move allowed us to accelerate a digital transformation that we had been working on for years,” says Aronson.