The new relationship Citizen – Government* #IBMbegov (part three): A mobile Government

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Kevin Brown, IBM

Kevin Brown is an executive in IBM´s Public Sector organization. He specializes in applying leading-edge information technology capabilities to support operational requirements particularly in enterprise integration/extension by utilizing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and mobile application technologies.

Prior to IBM, Mr. Brown managed multiple defense enterprise system integration and mobile technology programs. His work in these areas has been presented at several national and international command and control conferences.

On average, a person checks his smartphone 150 times a day, which is about once every six minutes. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be more than 200 billion connected devices.

Mobility is the foundation of new models of engagement. And it is much more than just the device itself; it is a platform for transacting in motion. Mobile is a part of everything we do and definitely changes the way we interact with the world. It gives us the ability to understand different situations in real time, making the analytics more relevant and more valuable. Mobility should not be the afterthought, but the starting point for every single enterprise or organization, as it defines what information is delivered to whom, when and where.

Nevertheless, mobile should not only be used only by companies in conversations with customers. Governments can also use mobile applications to meet new needs of their citizens. Actually, the governments of the future are expected to be mobile, so it can offer personalized services to each citizen and tailor them based on individual needs and contexts. Mobile is not just a one-way street, as it has advantages for both citizens and governments.

Mobile does not only play a crucial role in our collective consumption of information, it also generates huge amounts of new data. Mobile analytics can completely redefine the way governments work and can definitely boost the productivity by considerably compressing the time between identifying situations and taking actions on them. Secondly, mobile, combined with analytics, can improve government decisions through access to rich data on locations, within the proper environment, based on citizens´ preferences and behaviours. Moreover, because information platforms can get the right information to the right people, at the right time and place; these will finally be translated into a higher efficiency of the governments.

In the end, mobile will lead to the more engaged and even excited citizens who will get precisely what they need, when and where they need it, at a lower cost, in less time.

There are several examples of governments across the globe that have successfully adapted their services to today´s mobile reality. The British, Canadian, Italian and American governments have developed mobile applications that offer their citizens many public services.

In the next blog post, we will see exactly how the Belgian government is dealing with web-enabled-applications and how it stands compared with other successful examples.

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*The new relationship Citizen – Government is full series of 8 articles and studies about how the new era of technology changes is perceived and embraced by the public authorities and which are the new challenges encountered when trying to keep or build a relationship with the modern citizen or when trying to ensure them with security.