Wanted: A brand-agnostic strategy for mobile devices

Government data should be open, written in a common computer language and available through any electronic device, federal Deputy Chief Information Officer Lisa Schlosser said Thursday.

That's the advice Schlosser's office has heard from technologists in government, the private sector and academia, she said, as it prepares to launch a governmentwide digital strategy this spring.

Those groups also urged the federal Office of the Chief Information Officer to press for a governmentwide bring-your-own-device strategy for smartphones and tablets, to make Web content available through application programming interfaces and to use analytics to hone that content based on what the public is actually looking at, Schlosser said during a breakfast discussion sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Research Management.

The planned digital strategy will combine two documents the Office of Management and Budget previously planned to release separately this spring, one focused on how the government will use mobile technology and the other on reforming federal websites.

The dot-gov reform plan has been in the works since June and officials already have shuttered at least 300 sites according to a running tally maintained on Data.gov.

Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel first announced the mobile roadmap in January. He has said the roadmap will include plans to purchase smartphones and tablets in larger bundles to save money and to use mobile technology to make government more efficient and improve citizen services.

Officials plan to pay for new mobile investments with savings from shutting down duplicative information technology systems and by introducing more shared systems for human resources, financial management and other common tasks, Schlosser said Thursday.

"Our first focus area is ... find duplication, eliminate it and free up capital," she said.

Longer term, officials see an opportunity with mobile devices to share services from the beginning rather than building or buying multiple systems in each agency, Rick Holgate, CIO of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and co-chairman of the Federal Mobility Strategy Task Force, said during Thursday's event.

Holgate cited Business.USA.gov, a new catchall site for the federal government's interaction with businesses, as an example of breaking down agency siloes to improve citizen services.

In the long run, Holgate said, he can imagine shared systems like Business.USA.gov being launched within government.

"Why not have a [single] federal back office?" he asked. "Why not have one HR system that [the Office of Personnel Management] is responsible for or one financial management system run by [the Treasury Department]? That's a big idea and we won't get there anytime soon, but we've got to start thinking about it."

(Image via Custom media/Shutterstock.com)