Page 28 - FCW, July 2017

MOBILITY
Executive Viewpoint
A CONVERSATION WITH JON JOHNSON
The Enterprise Mobility Program Manager in GSA’s Office of IT Category talks about what goes into an enterprise approach to mobility.
SPONSORED CONTENT
JON JOHNSON
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY PROGRAM MANAGER, GSA’S OFFICE OF
IT CATEGORY
Why is it important for agencies to think in terms of “enterprise” mobility?
When you look at enterprise mobility in a holistic way, you’re looking at things not only associated with carrier service and devices—you approach it from a strategic level as well as a tactical level. You have to take a step back and ask, “Why are we doing mobile in government to begin with?” It’s about driving down costs, creating efficiencies, and providing tools to personnel so that they can achieve their mission more efficiently and more effectively—any place, any time.
Then you need to take that down a level and ask what it really means. What do our personnel really do? What are the tools they use now? How can we provide tools to not only increase their efficiency, but also increase their effectiveness?
Mobile is the way the world is going. That’s the transition we’re seeing right now, and it’s not just in the commercial space. We’re seeing the foundation being laid so the vision of a comprehensive mobile approach within each of our agencies ends up being achievable
and executable.
How big of a cultural shift is this for both federal managers and IT operations?
It’s quite significant. Personnel tend to be fairly path-dependent. Think about the emergence of cloud computing, for example. That started even before the digital government strategy, but for many agencies it was slow adoption. Why? It is probably because they viewed their infrastructure as being either on premises or in a centrally managed data center. Cloud didn’t fit that model. That is also why IaaS has had greater adoption than SaaS, because it more easily fit with the preconceived notions of infrastructure.
The trick with mobile is this: Is it part of IT? Absolutely, it’s part of IT. However, it’s different working with the operating system on a smart device or tablet. You don’t have the same access
to those devices as you would to a laptop or
any other internal system. That means you
need different tools. In some cases, you have to evaluate the risk-posture differently—multi-factor authentication and credentialing is still an issue in the mobile space.
But folks are working on that. They are starting to think about that a little bit differently. Once that identity piece gets solved, I think a lot of the other pieces will fall into place.
Where do you see the opportunities
to improve how government acquires mobile devices and services?
I’ve been associated with this interagency group called the Mobile Services Category Team. What we’ve been doing is defining those sub-components of mobility an agency needs to consider in
order to execute a mobile strategy. Early on, we identified what we call our working principles: standardization, simplification, and savings.
If [bureaus or components] buy in a similar —
if not identical way — it will be much easier to begin consolidating their buying. And once you consolidate, you can start optimizing—that is, right-setting what you buy with what you actually use. Typically, agencies fear overages, and so they often times buy four times the amount of voice that they need, 10 times the amount of data, or no data caps at all. That ties in directly with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), which is about paying attention to what you have, what you’re using and what you’re buying. It’s really that simple.
The problem is fragmentation—fragmentation in the federal market place, in budgets, in the locus of control within agencies. So what we’re trying to do in my group over at GSA, as well as in the Mobile Service Category Team, is share information that can help us manage what we have more effectively and then reinvest savings.
This interview continues at carahsoft.com/gsa-mobility.
S-26