RIM

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry phones have historically been the device of choice for secure mobile communication in the government market. BlackBerries offered unique business-oriented capabilities but lacked sex appeal to draw consumers to its products. Yet for government agencies that needed to supply their workers with a robust, secure cell phone, the business features won out over giving users a device that was “magical.”

Now with the rise of BYOD (“bring you own device”) in government agencies, RIM is suddenly no longer an appealing option for consumers who are now asked to buy their own device and bring it to work.
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This article originally appeared as a blog on “The New Information Economy.” For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, like us on Facebook.
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The days of government-issued BlackBerrys may be waning, but the reason may have less to do with the overwhelming popularity of iPhones and Android-operated devices than with the growing maturity of back-end systems used by agencies to manage their mobile devices.

For the General Services Administration, having an approved and functioning mobile device management system in place was a crucial component in its decision in recent weeks to begin offering its employees a choice over which smartphones and tablets they may use for government work. Keep reading →

Although there are many drivers behind the recent explosion of small form factor computing devices in the typical government enterprise environment – including smartphones, tablets, slate and netbook devices, e-readers, and more – perhaps the single most important and under appreciated driver is Microsoft Exchange-based email.

(Full disclosure: Before joining my current employer, I spent nearly 12 years with Microsoft Corp. where I oversaw the company’s strategic and tactical mobile initiatives across the federal government.) Keep reading →

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal CIO Council hosted a conference on the state of mobility in the federal government earlier this week that brought together top-tier industry mobility professionals across the U.S. federal mobile ecosystem to discuss the rapidly evolving adoption of mobile technologies.

For those of us who have been in this industry for many years like myself, the tone of remarks at the two-day conference, held Aug. 23-24, was a welcome return to reality and affirmation that security and data integrity should not be lost in all the recent hype over a new breed of powerful smartphones and tablet computing devices. Keep reading →