Only 40 percent of the Social Security Administration's retirement claims are processed online. With an increase in retirees looming, SSA hopes a mobile application aimed squarely at the heartstrings will raise the profile of its website--and in turn, shift claims processing from SSA field offices and phone services to the web.

The mobile app is the agency's "Baby Name Playroom," which draws on a dataset of American baby names dating back to 1880. The app has generated enough buzz to quickly become the most visited page on SSA's entire website and give overall web traffic a much-needed boost, said Adam Burstein, SSA's IT specialist in the office of innovation, Office of Chief Information Officer.

But the success of SSA's strategy of pushing web traffic through a mobile app isn't a given. In fact, panelists accompanying Burstein at a June 28 FedScoop event in Washington, D.C. said they would love to see agency websites vanish.

"It's not going to make sense, in the not too distant future, to have these really elaborate websites," said Kim Taylor, director of web services and the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

In an ideal future, citizens will no longer come to agency websites, said Haley Van Dyck, the former director of citizen engagement of the FCC new media team, who recently moved to USAID. Instead, agencies will expose their data in smarter ways, making it more integrated with consumer sources of information and more findable, said Van Dyck.

"While I love FCC.gov, as it consumed part of my soul recently, I really hope that the future is that nobody goes to FCC.gov anymore to get our data. But it's a little bit down the line," she added.

However, said Van Dyck, agencies can prepare for a mobile future, today. With the redesign of FCC.gov, "we were very contentious, while creating that site, about making sure we were building the underlying infrastructure in a way that was easy to spin mobile applications off of," said Van Dyck.

All information on the site is a web service call coming through an API, she explained. "So, we can just pull those web service calls in whichever combination we want and we set up our mobile app less than 6 days after we built the site."

"There are huge implications when you actually think about mobile as your starting point and not as an add on," said Van Dyck.

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