The Veterans Affairs Department is expected to launch a test program next week that would permit as many as 1,000 VA employees to use mobile smartphone and tablet devices to access the VA’s information network, according to comments made by VA’s Roger Baker, reported by Federal News Radio.
Baker, VA’s assistant secretary for information technology and chief information officer, explained that employees will have to demonstrate a genuine business need for the mobile devices.
As part of the program, VA is prepared to issue up to 1,000 smartphone and tablet devices to qualifying employees, although the exact source of funding is still being hammered out, the report said.
Participating employees will also have to “give up your BlackBerry or your laptops” Baker said in the report.
The devices are expected to be used primarily for remote access to secure email and information viewing, and the ability for users to run software on the devices will be closely controlled.
The report noted that Baker wouldn’t confirm whether Apple is the product of choice for the mobile devices, but he has said in an earlier interview that VA would chose popular devices in the test.
The VA program mirrors a similar pilot test that began earlier by the FAA, which experimented replacing paper copies of electronic flight manuals with an electronic version stored on an iPad.
Federal regulations require a variety of encryption and credentialing programs, which, along with concerns about lost devices, have deterred agency IT executives from allowing consumer-friendly mobile devices from accessing agency data networks.
However, agencies are under mounting pressure to find ways to accommodate mobile technologies to untether federal employees to make them more productive.
Baker tried to downplay the impact of the program, according to the report:
“At this introduction point, it’s not going to have dramatic effect,” Baker said. “For what you can do with it right now, it’s only somewhat more useable than the other mobile devices we’ve had in our infrastructure. It will have the same level of encryption, but you will be able to access our information gateway that is more viewable.”