FedBytes: Say Goodbye to Your Desktop PC and Phone
Hardware, software and tech news from across the government and around the country. This week: growth of mobile devices.
As workforces become increasingly mobile, CIOs are predicting that laptops, tablets and smartphones will take the place of desktop PCs and telephones. It’s a move toward modernizing the government as well as an opportunity to save tax dollars. That, and much more, in this edition of FedBytes.
- The General Services Administration’s Digital Services Innovation Center has a web page that includes links to the digital strategies of federal agencies. The information is published in different formats to allow the public to track agency progress. Read more on Digital Services Innovation Center.
- Apparently, it’s not only hackers who are working to find ways around organizations’ efforts to secure mobile data. A recent iPass Mobile Workforce Report indicates that nearly 25 percent of mobile workers circumvent IT controls in order to access corporate data with their smartphones. Read more on ZDNet.
- A new strategic plan released by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) spells out the organization’s vision, goals and objectives for the next five years. DISA director Lt. Gen. Ronnie D. Hawkins Jr. said of the plan: “DISA is a combat support agency, and our number one priority is enabling information superiority for the warfighter.” The plan states that DISA wants to converge a wide variety of IT operations into a single joint platform that can be used by all military services. This strategy is intended to boost security while reducing costs and improving access to information. Read more on DISA.mil.
- Having a phone and a computer on your desk could soon be a thing of the past. A study by Virgin Media Business indicated that nearly two-thirds of CIOs predict desk phones will disappear from everyday use within the next five years. The study also showed that 62 percent of CIOs expect PCs to no longer be used. Read more on TechRepublic.
- In the first half of this year, federal agencies reduced their costs by more than $4 billion, savings that can be attributed to, among other things, “innovative management techniques” and better use of technology. Writing on the OMB Blog, Jeffrey Zients, director of the Office of Management and Budget, cited as an example an Agriculture Department effort to consolidate mobile phone contracts. The department got rid of 1,700 unused and obsolete mobile phone lines, leading to $4.7 million in savings. Read more at Federal Computer Week.
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