With federal agencies and departments developing a myriad of mobile applications for citizens, and agency employees, the government should be moving to develop application tools that are platform agnostic and have multiple uses, according to Dr. Rick Holgate, who played a leading role in developing the mobility recommendations in the government’s new digital strategy.

The new digital government strategy, released May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget, accompanied by a memorandum from the White House, is designed to give agencies a roadmap on how to embrace and optimize use of digital technology. It combines earlier efforts on the government’s original mobility strategy and a lesser-known web reform strategy, said Holgate, CIO of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“The mobility strategy was about supporting mobile devices for the federal workforce,” he said. In contrast, “All of the behind-the-scenes work around exposing and thinking about building services were in the web reform plan. It didn’t make sense to have two separate strategies. “This is merging the two into the digital government strategy.

“The old strategies were more technology focused. The digital government strategy took that up a notch,” he added. “And will look at the role of government and how to be more effective if we adopt these strategies.”

One of the primary missions of the strategy is to ease the path for agencies that want to incorporate mobile applications and other digital features into their services – both for the public and for internal employee use.

Rather than relying on a “who do you know” informal network of designers, the strategy envisions a central repository for basic application code that could be adapted to multiple uses, Holgate said.

“Some of the examples might be either just developing the environments that agencies could use for their respective app development and tap into resources that could be a more centrally available model,” he said. “That makes it easier for agencies to engage in application development. It lowers the barrier of entry.”

He said that way, agencies don’t have to start from scratch if they want to develop a mobile application.

One of the parts of the strategy that has not been fully fleshed out is how that central repository for application and other digital techniques would work.

Holgate said much of the procedure will be worked out by Gwynne Kostin, director of mobile for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, which has been doing some preparation work in this area. Kostin was just named to lead a new Digital Services Innovation Center, which is part of the digital strategy, to share innovative ideas.

Holgate said agencies that develop pieces of code will have an obligation to put that code in a repository where it is “easily findable and reusable. People who have done really cool things will have an expectation or a responsibility to share that very cool stuff,” he said. “So it’s not ‘who do you know.'”

It’s also not clear what role the group that made the mobility recommendations will play going forward.

Another aspect of the government’s mobility strategy was reiterated in a blog posted by Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel, saying one of the primary aims of the strategy is to take a “customer-centric” approach to delivering services to the American people.

VanRoekel also said that in the coming year, Americans will see what he called an “important shift” in the federal government as agencies start to “open up their data to the public and give outside developers tools to build new services.” He said that the government will transform www.data.gov into a “catalog” that will pull things together from agency websites.