Last May, we released the Digital Government Strategy 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. GSA recently released a Request for Technical Capabilities on FedBizOpps (see Figure 1 below) that aims to identify existing solutions that meet the greatest governmental need. The output of this exercise will be an objective review of vendors’ capabilities and insights to help agencies with market research so that they buy capabilities that match their strategy on mobile platforms.
 
Responses are due on March 8th, and we look forward to see a robust response from the vendor community as we continue to shape our approach to mobility management. As always, I thank you for your commitment to delivering for the American people.

(By Steven VanRoekel, U.S. Chief Information Officer)