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Posted on 02/03/2011 6:57:49 PM PST by Swordmaker
The Department of the Interior will purchase a small number of the tablets in an effort to enhance worker productivity.
The Department of Interior plans to purchase and distribute Apple iPads to see how the devices can improve worker productivity. More Government Insights
The move is part of a larger acquisition of Apple hardware products the department plans to make and mirrors similar moves by businesses to experiment with giving employees iPads and similar tablet devices to see how it affects job performance. Interior is seeking to acquire the tablet devices, which will be "used in personal productivity and visual media" within the department, as part of a two-year, firm fixed price indefinite-delivery contract, according to a public request for proposals posted on FedConnect. The contract period will begin April 1. Other products Interior seeks to buy in the acquisition include MacBook Pro and Air notebooks, and MacPro, iMac, and MacMini desktops.
Accelerate The deployment of Virtualization in your Environment Although federal workers say they are using a range of personal computing and mobile devices as part of their everyday lives, the tools are still largely absent from their work environment. A recent report by Forrester Research found federal workers are generally unsatisfied with the technology they use at work, with only 9% of them saying they use mobile devices on the job.
That number could increase if Interior's experiment goes well, especially with research showing demand and interest among employees for new technologies.
For its part, Interior has been one of the federal agencies out in front of the federal open government move to use modern technologies to improve IT operations internally. However, the department ran into a stumbling block recently with a strategy to move its 88,000 employees to cloud-based email and collaboration tools.
The department's plan to award an estimated $59 million contract to Microsoft to deploy its email and collaboration services was blocked by a court injunction stemming from a lawsuit by Google and reseller Onix Networks. The companies filed suit in late October charging Interior with failing to follow federal procurement guidelines in its search for a hosted collaboration suite last year.
Forrester's research also found that government workers seek better ways to collaborate, claiming current means of using email to work together in groups are not efficient enough.
Federal agencies must eliminate 800 data centers over the next five years. Find how they plan to do it in the new all-digital issue of InformationWeek Government. Download it now (registration required).
Interior needs to be handing out drilling rigs.
Anything that would get rid of the Microsoft POS cr*p on my office machine would be fine with me.
And may Outlooknbe given to the Muslims.
They deserve it.
Gummint staffers in China have abacuses, and that’s quite ‘nuff!
Now we know why ‘sales’ were up in January, government buying stuff for government employee’s with our tax dollars.
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The federal government has too much money.
Our local library has purchased Nooks and Kindles. Again, government has too much money.
Enhance government worker productivity?
Pigs will fly before ANYTHING can be done that enhances US government worker productivity.
Nothing but more tax money wasted.
What the heck is the point of that?
I have a Nook, and it's a great consumer device, but what the heck does a library need with one? You could fill one up with Project Gutenberg-type works, but there is still no point to it, because you can do that just as well from a computer.
Are they lending Nooks?
more giveaways, sickening.
Yes. They are lending nooks and kindles as well. I spoke to a librarian who told me he expects most to disappear. They have a tremendous problem with book theft as it is. He indicated the librarians don’t want the electronic readers but the administrators above them are convinced they have to do this to serve the patrons. Meanwhile, the physical book acquisition and replacement budget has been slashed to fund this new program.
One thing that would make sense with having these types of devices would be if they were loaded up with the Project Gutenberg library on them, and were not allowed to leave the premises. You could save yourself a heck of a lot of space in books if you had all the classics on devices such as that. Also, if you were in a particularly literate area, and you had 5 people who wanted to read, say, Paradise Lost, they could each read their own copy while they were there, while still allowing the dead-tree edition to remain on the shelf. You still couldn't let people take them out though, because there is no way you could ever keep up with breakage in fines.
Now, that brings up something interesting in my tiny head. It might make sense for the library (or school for that matter), to assemble archives of particular sets of classics that might be a part of a curriculum in a convienient place to download to one of these types of devices (or laptops for that matter), if the customer already had one. Yeah, it's easy enough to search for stuff on the internet, but not everyone is aware of how many public domain books are available in high-quality formats for download. Gutenberg, as already mentioned does a pretty good job of packaging books in multiple formats for various types of e-readers.
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