mobile

I ‘m in Seoul, South Korea, this week for a Global e-Government Forum. Seoul is 13 hours ahead of Washington, DC, so for more than half the day, it’s tomorrow. But that’s not the only way that Seoul is in the future. The smell of kimchi mixes with the omnipresent electronica of smartphone rings and tablet notifications.

The Samsung building is visible from my hotel room, and its logo appears on at a majority of devices I’ve seen in this city. I’ve learned that this country is home to nearly 50 million people and 30 million smartphones, about 10% higher than smartphone usage in the U.S. Keep reading →

Some companies, famously, have game rooms for employees. Most organizations require that their employees abstain from gaming while at work, and some go so far as to block not only gaming Websites, but many social sites as well.

When employees bring their own smartphones to work, however, and when they connect to the internet using their own networks, employers cannot simply block a site on their own server and think they’ve solved the problem of distracting technology. Keep reading →

Several weeks back, at a GTRA Council Meeting, I heard my former CIO at EPA, Malclom Jackson, talk about “Developing a Secure Mobile-First Culture – the EPA’s Story.”

Among other points, he announced an “aggressive and accelerated procurement for new EPA collaboration tools”: one month to advertise, one month to decide, and four months to implement, so it is ready by November. Malcolm deserves credit on a number of fronts for pushing these ideas forward and quickly.

But it also reminded of a point about government that I experienced many times during my 30-plus years of government service at EPA: namely, senior managers in government repeat work that has been done in the past either because they do not know about it or choose to ignore it and start from scratch again.

I asked him if he was also working on the two functions that I had found important in my experience with doing this, provisioning content and dealing with limited bandwidth, and he said they were.

But I know from my experience at EPA that those two things are not going to happen in a short period of time. It took me three years to prepare EPA’s best content in a collaboration tool that supports limited bandwidth use on both desktop and mobile devices.

In my government experience, the 90-9-1 rule applies… only 1% will really use (new tools) and be doers and evangelists.”

I would have also felt better about what Jackson announced if he had mentioned it supported and followed the standards outlined by Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel in his Building a Digital Government Strategy.

One can do these things from the top down: That is, respond to the need for collaboration tools for an agency that work on mobile devices, procure them and hope that the employees put their content in them.

Or one can work from the bottom up: Use what employees are already using to put their content in to collaborate with others and see if those tools will scale up and federate.

We have all seen organizations procure yet another set of collaboration tools, only to then have a massive migration problem with legacy content and users still continue to use their tools of choice. For example, mobile has evolved from “This is the only tool we offer” (e.g. BlackBerry) to now Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) (e.g. iPhones, iPads, etc.)

So what should Malcolm and others in his situation do?

First, I would go around asking and looking for what has already been done and ask the real productive people at EPA, who are collaborating with others inside and outside the agency, what they are using (at EPA or outside of EPA) or would use if they had permission, and encourage others at EPA to try those pockets of excellence first.

Keep reading →

Federal and state government agencies have been launching programs allowing their employees to use their personal mobile devices at work to access data and business applications with an eye toward saving money. But many are often unaware of hidden costs associated with BYOD programs.

While these programs can provide all of advantages of mobility, unless managed carefully, they will not deliver their primary selling point: reduced costs. Keep reading →


The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is trying to do for the public what the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) did for veterans by building on the VA’s popular “Blue Button” application, allowing patients to get their medical records electronically on their mobile devices.

The “Blue Button” mashup challenge will be designed to bring “health information to the masses,” said Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health information technology coordinator. It will allow anyone whose doctor keeps computerized records to get those records on mobile devices like phones, tablets and laptops. Keep reading →

Mobile file sharing provider Accellion has partnered with Good Technology and Mocana Corp. to introduce three new enterprise content-sharing applications for mobile devices. The applications permit agency employees to share enterprise data, similar to technologies such as Dropbox, YouSendIt and Box, but in a way which meets military-grade security standards, allows multiple levels of authentication, and which works on with a variety of popular devices and applications.

Using Good Technology’s Good Dynamics product, and a similar virtual container product from Mocana, the new mobile apps that Accellion announced this week allows enterprise users to collaborate and view more than 200 different file types, editing and sharing files from a secure, encrypted location using smartphones and tablets. Keep reading →

Mobile technology is not only impacting how people and organizations work, it’s also beginning to impact the U.S. economy in new and not-altogether-surprising ways.

A new report from Recon Analytics, presented by Roger Entner at an event last month hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute, highlighted some of the significant ways the U.S. wireless industry is changing the nation’s economic landscape, and in turn, is adding momentum to adoption of mobile technology in the workplace. Keep reading →

Citizens in seven leading countries suggest that the gap between government and the private sector is narrowing when it comes to delivering services electronically, according to a newly-released study.

Though the research reaffirms that governments have more work to do-and that some nations, such as Singapore, are much farther along than others in serving citizens electronically-the study’s findings also suggest that governments have come farther in their game of catch up with the private sector than many observers have suspected. Keep reading →

Verizon is teaming up with a Vienna, Va., provider of government-grade encrypted voice-calling software to deliver secure mobile calling capabilities to the U.S. government.

In what Verizon described as a collaborative strategic agreement with Cellcrypt, the two companies expect to release a jointly marketed mobile voice-encryption solution this fall designed to meet the needs of military, intelligence and civilian agencies. Keep reading →


As chief technology officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Peter Levin is responsible for the cybersecurity of the largest medical system in the United States and the second largest federal agency.

His job involves helping to facilitate and secure the flow of personal health information among the VA employees at hundreds of hospitals, clinics and offices nationwide, and making that information available electronically to the 21.9 million veterans and their families who depend on the VA for their medical care. Medical professionals and veterans are increasingly seeking to access that information via mobile devices, which raises new concerns about privacy. Keep reading →

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