Mobility: The next government model for public engagement

We hear much about the impact of workplace mobility in terms of the freedom to work outside the office, improve process efficiency, and reduce capital costs. But the real power of mobility is its potential to create whole new business models and offer new services and products to customers.

For a change, government is one of the industries leading this mobile transformation in the field by embracing mobility as a means to better engage with citizens.

Overall there is tremendous enthusiasm for mobility across federal, state and local governments. Mobility is really the next model for engaging the public because it goes beyond the web browser to position the mobile device as a way to catch eyeballs and create a two-way discussion with citizens.

The second annual Consumerisation of IT study, conducted for Unisys by IDC, found that from 2010 to 2011 the proportion of Australian workers in enterprise organisations who said they used iPhones for work purposes grew from 9 per cent to 28 per cent while iPads and other tablets grew from 14 per cent to 25 per cent.

However, the true power of mobility in the workplace is not just that more employees are using mobile devices for work. Sure, mobility can help improve worker productivity and provide another channel for customers to access to services – but the really exciting thing is the opportunity to better engage and collaborate with the public.

Mobility in this century is probably the most exciting evolutionary change in the way IT can help society transform itself. The public sector is at the centre of this, and what they are doing is very exciting: governments are using mobility to better serve what have been traditionally underserved demographic groups in ways that were not possible with the Internet because of the limitations imposed by the digital divide. In the U.S., the Internal Revenue Service has a mobile app that allows citizens to find out the status of their tax refunds, which is something that a lot of people want to know but was simply unavailable on a self-service basis in the past. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission developed an app for citizens to test their own broadband connection speed. This is actually a great example of changing a business process to put the process of collecting information in the hands of the public. It illustrates a new model based on public use of inexpensive mobile applications to collect information – in this case saving money that the FCC would have would have otherwise been required to spend to collect information about performance across the country for future broadband initiatives.