3 Steps for Implementing Mobile Projects in Your Agency

Jim Tyrell is principal JBoss Solutions architect in Red Hat’s U.S. public sector.

In our very connected world, mobile devices have permeated every aspect of our lives -- including those within federal agencies. Whereas only a couple of years ago, federal agencies regulated the use of personal devices, today they are looking to integrate them into the daily lives of employees and leverage their use for citizen engagement.

As such, they’re beginning to follow the lead of commercial organizations, which may allow employees to bring their own device. Although mobile may present challenges, it also offers opportunities. Specifically, it can help your agency become leaner and more agile, while helping coworkers and field and military personnel become more efficient.

Of course, it’s your job to make sure everything runs smoothly and securely. That’s no small task, but a few choices can help ease the adoption of mobile within your agency.

These choices -- surrounding policies, development environments, and software -- can also help you feel better about your ability to better manage the use of personal devices and give users the mobile experience they may have come to expect.

1. Establish Your Policies

Develop guidelines as to how to best manage the shadow IT that can creep into your agency. Increasingly, people are using personal applications at work, often without IT’s knowledge or approval. These include cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox, or social media applications like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You should get in front of these types of apps and, if necessary, establish policies regarding the use of those applications.

You should also carefully evaluate and question all other security protocols. For example, when an associate leaves, how will you prevent your organization's information does not leave with that associate on a mobile device? How will you stop information from leaking via the network communication required for mobile applications?  How will you manage the organization’s information securely since, by definition, mobile applications will pierce some part of the firewall?

2: Define Your Mobile Environment (and Use Cases)

Your next step is to decide on a developer environment and create profiles of acceptable devices. Flexibility here is key, as mobile use cases can vary widely from project to project. Choose the tools that best fit the project at hand, and its requirements, whether that means selecting developer tools for a specific native environment or taking a hybrid approach.

It is also important to save your code artifacts and manage certificates that enable the publishing of your mobile applications. Selecting the appropriate development environment can help you do this and empower you to target any number of different end user mobile operating systems, sometimes even natively.

3. Use “As-a-Service” Software

When publishing your mobile applications, using a proxy can have many benefits and help accelerate your organization’s app development and distribution.

For instance, an app store may provide the ability to centralize the distribution of applications and gateway communications inside your technology demilitarized zone, and Mobile Backend-as-a-Service can provide and help manage back-end connections and application program interfaces.

This can enable you to use only specific back-end integration services that have been granted access and inject greater security into internal requests between device and back-end systems. It can also simplify auditing and tracking, as communication is routed through one managed endpoint. The process of updating and managing applications is also more simplified by pushing updates from the cloud-based MBaaS, rather than requiring continuous app downloads.

Most MBaaS relies on Platform-as-a-Service technology, and combines the benefits of cloud and mobile. A PaaS can grant your applications the ability to automatically scale up your workloads as activity increases.

It can also give your developers self service capabilities so they can more easily provision demo and development environments, while supplying you with the agility you may need for your DevOps and mobile strategies.

Whatever you do, one thing you have to remember is that mobile doesn't appear to be going anywhere. Indeed, it is likely to be part of the future of government IT.

Mobile devices may continue to usurp desktop and laptops as the preferred computing tools of both government workers and citizens, as the mobile workforce and citizen engagement become more engrained in our culture. As such, it is best to develop a plan that can help set you up for that future.

(Image via LDprod/Shutterstock.com)