The Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday unveiled a 12-month roadmap for agencies to speed adoption of mobile technologies and improve public access to their digital data and services.
“We need to produce better content and data, and present it through multiple channels in a program and device-agnostic way,” OMB said in the long-awaited strategy. “We need to adopt a coordinated approach to ensure privacy and security in a digital age.”
The strategy, “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People,” includes 29 action items for agencies, the federal Chief Information Officers Council, OMB and other entities to achieve in one to 12-month increments. President Obama set an August deadline for agencies to create a page on their websites to publicly report their progress.
By next month, OMB will create a Digital Services Advisory Group to develop governmentwide guidance for Bring-Your-Own-Device and promote best practices for improving digital content and services. The Department of Defense, Homeland Security Department and National Institute of Standards and Technology will develop standard security requirements within a year for mobile and wireless adoption, according to the strategy.
The 36-page document also encourages agencies to pilot, document and expand new approaches for securing mobile devices.
“For example, if applications, operating systems, and data reside in an appropriately secured cloud environment rather than on a device, this will limit the potential impact to an agency in the event a device is lost, stolen, or compromised,” the strategy said. The use of mobile devices management systems to monitor the devices and strengthened identity and access management can also provide opportunities for better security.
The General Services Adminsitration will launch a Digital Services Innovation Center to promote shared solutions. Within a year, the center will launch a shared mobile app development program to help agencies “develop secure, device-agnostic mobile applications,” and provide them with a development and testing environment for applications, and validate official government apps.
The strategy sets deadlines for agencies to make digital information readily available to the public and Web developers.
By August, OMB will release a governmentwide policy to ensure data, content and application programming interfaces, or APIs, are accessible for all new IT systems and at least two existing systems. Software developers use these programming standards to integrate applications and make data more accessible via mobile applications and other platforms.
2 Comments
Outside all the politics this is a positive move forward however we need to set some oversight. All mobile applications that will be designed and developed must be done so in the USA. No outsourcing to other countries for these jobs belong in the USA. As soon as this information hit the streets countries like China, Russia, India and the Philippines started getting excited. Most importantly let’s not let other countries build programing code that will touch our government systems. If these are built outside the USA we could have issues with security. Overall before any RFP is released President Obama must direct this initiative towards creating jobs and opportunities in the USA.
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