Recently, Federal Technology Insider interviewed Kimberly Hancher, CIO of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the BYOD pilot program that was put in place to save money and give greater flexibility to employees.  This post below was originally published on Steven VanRoekel’s blog and offers us a look at progress made to enable a federal mobile workforce.  

Last May, we released the Digital Government Strategy (PDF/ HTML5) as part of the President’s directive to build a 21st Century Government that delivers better services to the American people.

A key objective of the strategy is to enable an increasingly mobile workforce to access services anywhere, anytime, on any device. As we adjust to this new digital world, we need to seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways.

We are making great progress on that front and thanks to the hard work of the General Services Administration (GSA) we are a step closer to establishing a government-wide mobile device management (MDM) program.

The program’s goal is to identify existing solutions and contract vehicles that will enable agencies to provision and secure devices, authenticate users, deploy apps and access data. The development of MDM solutions, and their adoption in agencies, is still in the early stages. This gives the government a small window of opportunity to avoid fragmented buying across Federal agencies and programs, and help shape this emerging space to meet the broadest needs.

To that end, GSA has worked with agency representatives across government and industry partners to identify the Government’s current and potential MDM requirements.

By Steven VanRoekel, U.S. Chief Information Officer, Office of Management & Budget

To read more about the GSA requested, view Steven’s full blog post at https://cio.gov/digital-government-strategy-mobile-device-management/.