Shared services and 'bring your own device' policies top mobile dialogue

Easy sharing, flexibility and common standards should be three major pillars of federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel's forthcoming mobile roadmap, according to an online dialogue among federal workers and the public.

The 10-day dialogue, which closes Friday, is aimed at helping officials flesh out the bare-bones mobile strategy that VanRoekel released last week. Users can submit their own mobile ideas to the site, comment on other people's ideas, and vote suggestions up or down.

The mobile roadmap will tackle how the government buys and manages employee smartphones and tablets, plus how agencies build, buy and use mobile applications, either to manage internal functions or to communicate with the public. The final draft of the roadmap is due in March and VanRoekel plans to launch new mobile procurement vehicles by June or July.

The most popular suggestion on the dialogue page so far is to create a public shared services catalog where agencies can post what the idea's originator Gwynne Kostin calls "the building blocks of [mobile] apps," such as source code and programming interfaces. Other agencies or members of the public could then use those building blocks to create separate applications without duplicating their efforts.

Kostin heads the General Services Administration's mobile division and is a moderator of the roadmap dialogue. Many of the dialogue's most popular ideas came from participants who, like Kostin, are deeply involved in government mobile strategy, but several other recommendations were from people less involved in mobility or from anonymous commenters.

Another suggestion called for a government-only app store. That idea caught more jeers than cheers, largely because commenters objected to building a new site for citizen-facing government apps. Kostin commented that a separate store might be a good idea for apps that are internal only to government.

Another popular idea on the site is promoting a governmentwide "bring your own device" policy that would require agencies to shift focus toward remotely securing applications through which employees look at sensitive information directly rather than securing the devices those applications are loaded onto.

Bring your own device policies and federal mobility generally have been buoyed by the move to cloud-based versions of email and other systems, which allow employees to use Web versions of those tools from any Internet-connected device.

Other popular dialogue suggestions included relying as much as possible on shared mobile services, using best practices from industry, and striking the right balance between efficiency and security, though commenters disagreed on precisely where that balance rests.

Unpopular suggestions tended to advocate limiting flexibility in mobile use.

The least popular suggestion to date was to standardize the government on a single mobile operating system -- in this case Windows Phone 7 -- rather than allowing flexibility. The commenter, who works in the private sector, complained his company's bring your own device policy had led to employees being locked out of its systems and not knowing how to manage information securely when they do get in.

Another idea in the dialogue is to create governmentwidemobility centers of excellence dedicated to different tasks such as vetting new smartphones for security issues and establishing best practices for building citizen-facing apps.