According to Defence chief information officer, Greg Farr, the highly influential and pervasive has affected all sectors of all sectors of government and the economy -- including Defence.

As such, armed forces personnel were now using not only using smartphones in the field, but sourcing applications from commercially available sources -- such as the Apple App Store -- to help them carry out their roles.

The response to this trend, Farr said, was for Defence to enable its personnel to create the applications they needed to get their jobs done.

"I believe Defence needs an app store," Farr said, speaking at an Australian Computer Society (ACS) conference on government IT. "I think we need to have that environment in-house where people can develop those apps and use them.

"Now there is a number of issues around it, but I can see that in the next one to two years that Defence will have an app store where -- not people in the IT shop necessarily -- but real business users who have a real business need will spend a couple of days developing an app."