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.

Human services agencies are facing unprecedented challenges brought about by the ongoing fiscal crisis. As their resources are shrinking, employees are stretched beyond their capacity by the growing number of citizens seeking public assistance through programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and HUD Section 8.

“Many human services workers view technology as a barrier to client interaction,” says Dr. Adrian Aguilera of the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Many shun technology advancements, such as mobile devices, despite the fact that such tools can actually simplify client relationship management. In addition, mobile devices, including laptops and tablets, can help human services caseworkers increase their efficiency as they adjust to higher caseloads.

Cloud computing has been a bright spot in a gloomy financial environment, with an increasing number of state and local governments adopting cloud infrastructures to cut IT costs and increase efficiencies. Simultaneously, agencies have seen significant increases in the amount of useful operations and tactical data they are collecting.

But just like chocolate and peanut butter, “Big Data” and the cloud are better together. These two IT trends are about to converge, a marriage that promises to permanently alter the way that agencies collaborate and share data.

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?