Mobile Roundup: Hear from 3 government leaders about their biggest challenges and success

The Obama administration has outlined their very ambitious 29 program Digital Government Strategy. You can find our recap here. Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Chief Technology Officer Todd Park have hit the ground running.

But the digital government strategy started as a mobile government strategy. You might remember when VanRoekel announced it at CES Conference back in January. It has morphed into something much bigger. So did the mobile get lost in the shuffle?

Tom Suder is the president and founder of MobileGov.

“It’s important to keep in mind that the end user, the people benefitting from this strategy are not just the public consumers, but the government as well,” said Suder.

Suder’s 4 Favorite things in the Digital Government Strategy:

1. Presidential Fellow Program — puts the best and the brightest together to solve problems.
2. Digital Services Innovation Center — build once and use many times across agencies and platforms. This will help eliminate working in silos.
3. Mobile Version of FedRamp – The mobile version FedRAMP will be led by the departments of Homeland Security and Defense and the National Institute of Standards of Technology.
4. APIs – It’s a great first step to come up with common APIs for systems. It will help develop mobile instead of everyone developing security protocols in silos, it will speed development of mobile.

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The Office of Management and Budget is re-thinking its mobile strategy. They’re new roadmap — moves away from apps and to focus more attention on improving functions and engaging citizens and businesses.

Lisa Schlosser, the deputy administrator in the Office of E-Government and IT, told the group at the AFFIRM conference on mobile computing in Washington, that the strategy is based on the administration’s desire to focus more broadly on how and when data is delivered, and not about the devices.

Schlosser says the new strategy will:

• “Be a little bigger than a mobility strategy, the new strategy will treat mobile devices as just the conduit for content. The goal is to get data to where it needs to be, regardless of the devices used.”
• “Embrace a bring-your-own-device ethos.”
• “It’s not about having something cool, although that’s nice, it’s not about the technology, it’s about how we deliver the mission agenda.”

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Imagine going without the Internet — at all. That is what the Interior Department had to do for years. The agency has a new IT strategy — hear about the agency’s new IT Transformative Initiative with Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology, Information and Business Services — Andrew Jackson.