Gwynne Kostin, director of the Digital Services Innovation Center in the Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, sat down with FedScoopTV to discuss trends in mobility.
On trends in federal mobility:
The big trend we are seeing right now. Agencies are working on a number of things. One has to do with the governance of mobile. So when we started talking a couple years ago there was a lot of innovation in the mobile space and now agencies are actually bought in to the importance of mobile and are looking at how you brand the applications well and your strategy for the level of service. The other trend has to do with a problem we’ve been seeing over all is that it has to continued diversity of different devices. We’re seeing agencies go with a build once and deploy many option. And a lot of agencies are really focused now on mobile web.
The evolution of mobility:
The big driver for mobile has been the digital strategy … Part of the digital strategy is that each agency had to create two mobile products and two APIs. The APIs, application programming interfaces, are important because many mobile products are being built off those services. What were seeing is that every agency is getting its feet wet in this space, so as they have that experience, they are really looking at the broader spectrum of how they are delivering at services.
Lessons learned:
The big takeaway we’ve had the past few years ago is that we were really focusing on devices … The big lesson we’ve learned that is we really need to start looking upstream in the development. The application or the mobile website is the final product, but we need to look upstream and see how are those web services build? How is the infrastructure set up in terms of our data sets and the availability of that information?
