Mobile devices could be the next information technology asset removed from the core of agency information technology budgets. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra says the phenomenon of "employee-owned" mobile, what analysts often call the consumerization of IT, represents a "megashift" in federal IT.

"What if the government moved to a model where we would give every employee a subsidy of $2000--or whatever the right number is, that's what I'm exploring right now--and disintermediated the centralized IT departments," asked Kundra while speaking at a Feb. 25 AFCEA-Bethesda breakfast.

"It's mind boggling. We're paying 10 times more on some of the changes on some of these assets than the actual price of that asset," he added.

Kundra said mobile advancement has been stifled by CIO strategies that are overly driven by security considerations. If government employees could virtualize a mobile operating environment for work on their personal mobile device, security concerns would shift. CIOs would be less focused on inventory and device management and more focused on the HTTPS environment, a scalable approach, said Kundra.

"Everybody says to be more secure, the way to simplify is to have this single image. And we end up with this federal desktop core configuration and we sort of create this single platform. I think that's the old world," said Kundra.

"The new world, in my mind, is that we won't really care given what's happening with virtual instances of machines, given what's happening with virtual instances on PDAs," said Kundra.

Since December, Kundra's message has been clear and repetitive: Federal IT needs to shift from asset ownership to service provisioning. Kundra said he will be sharing more on his vision for a federal mobile strategy in the coming months.

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