First responders such as police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) play a critical, highly visible role in state and local government service. In fact, they’re often the public face of government itself.

In the past, public safety personnel relied on clipboards, paper charts and files. Employees had to commute back to a central office to synch devices, and complete and file paperwork, and information was only accessible from mainframe desktops. To significantly improve service and increase efficiency, public safety departments across the U.S. have turned to mobile computing technologies like laptops, tablets and smartphones.

To control financial and human resources and reduce costs, most government agencies have standardization policies for desktop environments. Agencies routinely let their employees choose from a number of standard desktop hardware and software configurations.

In both the private and public sector, laptops, tablets and smartphones are well on their way to becoming indispensible productivity tools. As governments move toward the inevitable adoption of mobile end user devices, broadening existing standardization policies can bring many benefits to the mobile environment.

Just as tablet sales in the consumer market have skyrocketed, data shows that adoption of tablets in government agencies will continue to increase, creating productivity improvements along the way.

Government technology information resource MeriTalk predicts that seven percent of all federal workers will be using tablets by the end of 2012, and it expects the number to increase to 19 percent by the end of 2013. But unlike the consumer market—where the tablet is primarily used to access movies, games and other entertainment—the key driver of tablet adoption in government agencies is improved employee productivity.

Field employees, such as building inspectors and code enforcers, can reap enormous benefits from using mobile computer devices. By eliminating time-consuming workflows that rely on manual, paper-based processes, mobile devices help inspection agencies improve operations and service delivery, while enabling them to increase revenue and lower costs.

The use of mobile devices on public sector networks is top of mind for most government agency and IT leaders. You can be sure that some form of mobile endpoint device is coming soon to the public sector—in spite of the security risks that keep agency IT leaders awake at night.

Don’t let security challenges derail your mobility plans, says U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel, who warns IT leaders against making a “false choice between security and innovation.”

Indeed, federal mobility initiatives such as VanRoekel’s federal mobility strategy, General Services Administration’s (GSA) strategic sourcing plan for mobility initiatives and National Institute for Standards and Technology’s (NIST) security guidelines for tablets and mobile phones will pave the way—and set the expectation—for state and local governments to securely use mobile devices while meeting their organizational objectives.

According to a new survey by MeriTalk, technology managers in the federal government project that 20 percent of their employees will use tablets for work by 2013. Already, nearly half of federal workers rely on laptops to get their jobs done, and that number is expected to hold strong.

But mobility isn’t just for the federal government; state and local agencies are leading the way.

In 2011, the state of Wyoming adopted Google’s cloud computing solutions for 10,000 employees, which will save the state more than $1 million a year and improve collaboration and connectivity between their in-office and mobile workforces.

In Michigan, the Department of Human Services provided laptops and camera-equipped smartphones to over 2,000 of its social workers, allowing them to complete work faster, more accurately and at a lower travel cost.

San Diego County declared that “mobile government (mGov) is the next logical step toward service improvement and effective response to economic and other pressures” in its strategic IT report.

So what’s holding some agencies back?