OVERVIEW

Wireless is ready to roll for government agencies and public-safety organizations, due to a combination of heightened need and technological readiness. The Department of Defense is one huge infrastructure for field-force deployment, and it has arguably the broadest and least centralized set of assets of any public or private organization in the world. At the same time, technology to manage logistics and personnel is sorely lacking. From the Army to the Navy to the Justice Department to the FBI, assets and information are managed with a welter of mostly antique hardware and software systems.

With this century s increase in terrorism at home and overseas, government, security and peace-keeping agencies have an urgent need to increase their data velocity, the time it takes for information to move from the field worker who gathers it to central databases where it can be plotted against that from other sources. With a wireless mobile device, a police officer evaluating a suspicious vehicle can not only query the stolen-vehicle database but can also report the vehicle s description and circumstances to other agencies such as the FBI, which may be searching for just such a vehicle.

The heightened need for security calls for a higher set of standards for tracking assets and a similarly enhanced ability to report and disseminate information. Yet many government field workers, from police officers to nuclear plant inspectors, are as paper-dependent as those in the private sector.

The public sector tends to lag behind the private in technology adoption, and...