Cisco: Mobile Apps Could Help Public Services Reach More People

The public sector’s use of mobile applications continues to grow as U.S. and international government units eye increased use of those tools to support citizen services, Jason Deign wrote in a piece published Monday on the Cisco website.

Deign writes that mobile apps work to grow service delivery to more citizens and enable “anytime, anywhere” access.

“If you think about reaching the citizens that you serve, you basically can reach almost all of them through a mobile app,” said Ian Finley, managing vice president of Gartner.

“You couldn’t reach them through a PC or even a web-based solution because not everybody went on the web.”

Finley noted that some agencies remain wary of increasing mobile app adoption due to what he says is the limited economic data available to quantify the benefits of mobile apps.

He suggested that such organizations with budget constraints could instead share information with the private sector to enable open source development of mobile apps.