From: Government Executive
By Bob Brewin
In November, 2010, Roger Baker, the chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department, had his first taste of what eventually became the bring-your-own-device revolution in the federal government.
Clever orthopedic residents at the Chicago VA hospital had developed their own calendar application hosted on Yahoo.com that contained information on more than 1,000 patients, including names, the last four Social Security number digits and scheduled surgeries. They accessed this information from handheld gadgets. Security was a joke — four residents shared the Yahoo account using the same password, and in turn passed that password on to other residents.
Baker also discovered eight other hospitals had turned to cloud-based Google Docs, which feature online spreadsheets, word processing programs and presentation software — to store patient information. He quickly ordered a shut-down of the Yahoo and Google accounts for security reasons. But he also realized he and the VA needed to keep pace with ground-up innovation.
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