GSA’s Kostin on Leveraging Mobility (VIDEO)

Gwynne Kostin, Director, Mobile, Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies, General Services Administration, discusses progress in federal government mobility with FedScoopTV.

How are you helping government leverage mobility?

“We’ve been working for the past 15 to 16 months on helping agencies make mobile more available for citizens. We’re talking about information and services that can be delivered to you any time, anywhere on any devices. We’ve been doing that by developing a community of practice, working with 45 or 50 different agencies and mobile innovators there to help accelerate and amplify what they are already doing.”

What are the biggest hurdles for mobile government and how can they best be addressed?

“What we’re seeing right now is kind of being hampered by what we know already. What I mean by that is we’re looking at the services and websites we have and looking at ‘how can we mobilize that?’ What that does it really takes the context away in what people are trying to do.”

What best practices are you seeing in the government when it comes to mobile?

“I don’t know if we’re at best practices yet, but we have good practices. The most important thing among agencies … is what agencies are doing around mobile and mobile development. This is a time of tight budgets, yet agencies are very anxious to deliver services the way citizens want them. They haven’t figured out how to do this the best way, so they are trying to find the best way to do things in their agencies along with finding a process to use their resources in the best ways possible.”