“The USDA is working its way through an ambitious iPad deployment that may come to serve as a model for a range of government agencies within the U.S. and around the world,” Ryan Fass reports for Cult of Mac. “The challenge was to develop a simple, intuitive, and effective field survey and data collection system.”
“The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is a division of the USDA that is charged with surveying and reporting agricultural data across the country. NASS operates in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico. With a staff of around 3,000 enumerators NASS conducts thousands of survey each year about agriculture across the country,” Fass reports. “The service has been operating since the mid-1800s and, until the iPad, it conducted surveys and collected data in pretty much the same way that it had back in the 19th century – with paper forms filled out by hand and mailed to various field offices.”
Fass reports, “Pam Hird, a project manager involved with the effort noted that the agency tried a range of tablets beyond the iPad as well as various PCs, none of which fit their needs.
We did test other tablets and PCs. But the iPad was the only one that met all of our requirements. To my knowledge, we were the first federal agency to put iPads into production.
Read more, including why iPad’s intuitiveness is so important, in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]