Mr. Rhodes is Chief Information Officer for the State of Georgia and Executive Director of the Georgia Technology Authority.
Mobile devices currently outnumber people in the United States and in many other countries. In fact, the number of mobile devices is about 103 percent of our nation's population, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group. You can bet that these devices and the applications running on them will have a big impact on how government agencies provide services to their constituents and manage their increasingly mobile workforce.
In Georgia government, mobility is getting a lot of attention.
Last fall, a taskforce of state agency CIOs was formed to work on Georgia's IT road map, and the group identified workforce mobility as one of its top priorities.
In March, GTA launched a new service that enables agencies to securely connect mobile devices such as Androids, iPhones and iPads to their e-mail systems and the state network.
And on May 22, GTA hosted a summit to look at leveraging workforce mobility and the use of mobile devices and applications in government. More than 200 people from state and local government agencies attended the Summit, and we saw participation from 47 state agencies, eight cities, six counties and three universities.
I hosted a steering committee that we formed to identify specific topics for the Summit. The makeup of the steering committee reflected our desire to promote collaboration among state as well as local government agencies in addressing technology issues common to us all. By helping to decide the topics for the Summit, steering committee participants ensured that the Summit addressed the issues that matter most to them. For example, at GTA we tend to focus on the best solution from a technology perspective, but participants said they needed help answering non-technical questions and wanted to explore practical ways for improving business operations through mobile devices and applications. As a result, the Summit featured a more balanced mix of technical and business topics.
The Summit was the first in a series based on the IT road map, and after the Summit, we'll bring the steering committee back together to talk about ways to improve future events.