Preparing the government for the tablet takeover

It seems like everything you read in the technology trades these days is about tablets. Every company has one, and if they don’t, they’re working on it. Apple has the iPad, Samsung has the Galaxy Tab, Amazon has the Kindle Fire, Motorola made the Xoom and HP released (and then discontinued) the Touchpad. Even Nokia is speculated to jump into the tablet party soon.

And it’s no surprise why. Tablets bring a limitless world of connectivity, cool apps and fun functionality to the user in a neat, highly mobile package. In fact, that’s why the federal government is starting to take a much closer look at this exciting technology.

According to a recent article in NextGov, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that it’s planning to purchase up to 100,000 tablets and distribute them to their staff. These tablets would mostly be used by VA doctors and other medical practitioners for things like bringing digital medical charts into patient exams. The tablets would enable the medical practitioners to look up conditions and otherwise benefit from the connectivity that tablets deliver over, say, paper charts. However, the tablets aren’t expected to be limited to these exact uses and only medical staff.

It’s exciting to see an agency like the VA utilizing new technologies, such as tablets, to change the way they operate and become more effective and efficient. And the VA isn’t going to be the only agency looking at tablets for that very reason. But it raises questions about the readiness of the federal government for these technologies.

It goes without saying that tablets are an exciting technology with immense upside, but they’re downright useless if the information that the end user needs isn’t available. Especially when you consider the mobility of tablets and their potential uses in the field.

As we’ve discussed in recent posts, the federal government still relies heavily on paper records. They accept applications for benefits and services on paper via traditional mail. They continue to store these records as paper. They print records out and share them by physically sending them to each other. Ultimately, while these processes continue, tablets are of little help.

For federal agencies to truly see the benefits and return on their tablet investments, they need to change the way manage data, records and other information. Instead of accepting information as paper, storing it as paper and sharing it as paper, they need to begin to capture data, image documents or otherwise create digital versions of records as they enter the agency. When this is accomplished, those documents can then more easily be stored, shared and searched. They also can be made available online or in the cloud to be accessed via mobile devices like tablets.

But managing and capturing data from incoming mail is just one step towards preparing the government for the increased mobility and capabilities of tablets. There are also existing records and documents to consider. The federal government has decades of records and data physically stored as paper. To ensure that the information in these records is available on tablets, they much be imaged, have the data extracted or otherwise digitized.

The allure of tablets and mobile devices for the federal government is great due to their ability to fundamentally change the way agencies operate and work towards accomplishing their mission. But the increases in efficiency and effectiveness that tablets can deliver will go unrealized if agencies can’t make the data necessary to do the job accessible.