GSA initiative to boost mobile computing adoption

GSA and 24 others launch Making Mobile Gov initiative to address challenges and best practices in making mobile computing work in the government. GSA\'s Gwynne ...

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
Federal News Radio

Mobile computing is more than just Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja or even mission critical applications.

It’s about strategy and understanding how agencies are using mobile computing across the government.

“Making an app is not a strategy, it might fit in with a strategy,” said Gwynne Kostin, the director of mobile in the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, after a panel discussion sponsored by AFCEA’s Bethesda, Md.’s chapter. Agencies, said Kostin, are looking at who their audience is, how they’re using mobile, where their mission space is. Where those things converge “are really their opportunities,” she said.

To help develop that broad strategy, Kostin said GSA and an interagency group June 22 launched the Making Mobile Gov initiative.

“The goal of this initiative is to make the case for mobile, for people in their agencies to make their case for the importance of mobile,” she said. “This initiative came from working with people who are mobile government innovators. There are 25 different agencies we have been working with in the community of practice, and making the case for mobile was an area they really identified as a way to accelerate using mobile in government.”

The Making Mobile Gov project has four phases, starting with discovering and detailing agency examples of mobile computing.

“We are asking people to weigh in what they think is important about mobile,” she said.

Phase two, which will launch June 29, will discuss the 10 challenges to mobile computing identified by successful agencies.

Phase three is a broader discussion on mobile, scheduled for July 15. Kostin said this is where industry, academics, non-profits and citizens can help agencies figure out solutions to these challenges and what is needed for the government to meet the needs and expectations of the public.

Finally by September, Kostin said GSA will create a community-generated wiki for agencies to find resources to improve how they approach and implement mobile computing.

“The challenges that have been identified have been challenges around strategy, around implementation, around how do we within government use these new technologies. We want to surface all these issues and then work on solutions,” said Kostin.

Another challenge is how GSA and the interagency group define mobile. The government has been using hand-held devices and laptops for more than a decade.

But Kostin said mobile computing has changed because it’s everywhere.

“When people leave their homes they take three things with them: they take their phone, they take their keys and they take their wallets. And they do it every single time,” she said. “So what we are seeing, this is becoming an extension of themselves, so expectations have changed. So as we are defining mobile, it is an extension of what we’ve been doing before, but it also is different because information is available via cell networks or WiFi wherever they are and that has changed the way we get information.”

Kostin said mobile also includes text messaging, mobile websites, native apps for phones or tablets and mobile ready apps.

“One of the things that was identified by our community of practice was that in a lot of agencies people were not aware of how they might be able to use mobile,” she said. “So it’s really bringing out information about ways people are using mobile in their own lives and examples of the ways agencies are using mobile in their own organization.”

Agencies can’t just focus on application development for several reasons, most of which is cost. Kostin said GSA looked into what it costs to make a mobile app, and found it ranges from $30,000 to $50,000 for a simple development effort to $100,000 for something that is more complex and mashes up data to more than $250,000 for a more complex app that uses animation and requires more programming.

Kostin said GSA is kicking off the Making Mobile Gov initiative now because mobile computing is in the nascent stages, similar to where the Web was in the last 1990s.

At that point, said Kostin, the Web was developing “and there were some really good and innovative and interesting things that happened,” she said of the late 1990s. “But there also was a lack of coordination and in some areas a lack of strategy. We have an opportunity right now because of current technologies, social networking and initiatives in terms of transparency and participation that allows us to work closely together and to recognize what we did before and learn from those. I think this is the time and the time is now.”

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