With many staff out in the field, local authorities are
at the forefront of the move to mobile IT. And for the technology
to pay off, staff must understand that old ways of working are gone
for good. Lindsay Clark reports.
The attraction of mobile technologies to government agencies is
compelling. Wireless devices enable a huge range of public sector
employees engaged in work such as social care, policing and
environmental health to combine working in the field with compiling
information back in the office.
Social workers, for example, will typically drive to visit
clients, make notes on paper about each meeting and then type up
the notes on a computer once back in the office.
The advent of wireless data networks, lighter and cheaper
laptops and mobile devices such as the Blackberry, could allow
social workers to compile more information while they are with
their clients and spend less time driving to and from the
office.
Using mobile technology in this way, among thousands of workers,
offers the government a massive efficiency saving while improving
services. It could be a big winner in the battle for the Gershon
targets, which expect every public sector body to make a 2.5%
efficiency gain by 2008.
Ian Laughton, head of e-government at Cambridgeshire County
Council, says the Gershon Report specifically mentions mobile
computing as a means of giving public sector employees more
productive time.
Laughton is also director of Nomad, a national project
established by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to
investigate how mobile technology can be used in local government.
It also passes on advice to other councils.
Nomad is currently putting together an analysis of savings
through new working practices enabled by mobile technology. "When
chief executives see you can save £1m, you will get their
attention," says Laughton.
The first step in mobile computing for councils is to allow
employees to work more flexibly; either from home or while moving
between different offices, according to Laughton. The second is to
target high-volume activities that require council workers to be
out and about.
For example, Peterborough Council has reorganised its council
house repair services around mobile technology. Maintenance workers
can have their schedules updated continuously by a centralised
contact centre, which takes calls from council house tenants.
Savings come from maintenance staff needing to visit base fewer
times and fewer jobs needing a second visit. However, Laughton
warns that such savings can only come with a lot of business
process re-engineering.
The technology is available for such applications, although
there is some work to do when integrating it and connecting to
existing back office systems. Laughton says suppliers of back
office systems should work together towards open standards to allow
integration with mobile technology, rather than trying to force
proprietary technology on users, which could be a problem.
However, councils can also have a tendency to develop overly
complex systems, says Andrew Watson, business development director
of Anite Mobile, which has worked with many councils on mobile
systems.
A lot of the gains from mobile working can be made from
supplying broadband to employees' homes and allowing them to upload
information there at the end of the day, without returning to the
office. Watson says, "One of the issues with mobile working is that
people associate it with the mobile phone and assume it should be
always on."
Always-on connections, such as 3G, can be expensive and
unreliable, causing users to revert back to paper. Most of the
gains can come from more straightforward and cheaper technologies,
he says.
However, the biggest challenge for mobile working projects is
not technical. "The most challenging thing for these projects is
the cultural shift," says Laughton. "You have got to get key
workers to understand this is going to be a different way of doing
their job. It is no good if key workers still believe they need a
bit of paper to do their jobs."
To overcome cultural barriers to introducing new ways of working
through mobile technology, project managers must involve end- users
from the start as they develop new business processes and design a
user interface that represents those processes in an intuitive
way.
Laughton says, "In the work that Nomad did, led by Cumbria
County Council, we learned that initially social workers could be
sceptical of anything other than quill pens because their
experience with office IT had not been positive. A lot of work had
to be done explaining the benefits. But once they got the forms on
the tablet PCs, the work done on the business processes paid off
and it was a really intuitive system to use. At the end of the
pilot, they did not want to give the equipment back."
Nomad has already proved popular with local authorities; around
1,200 have contacted the project to learn from its experiences.
Although security is a concern as some very sensitive personal
data may be transmitted through the air, these risks can be
managed, says Laughton. Mobile devices can be locked, the
communication channel encrypted and, in the case of social care
documents, they can be signed by both the social worker and the
client and sealed electronically.
However, not all applications require such measures. "I think IT
departments need to be subtle about security requirements. You do
not need the same measure for social care records as for fixing a
dead street lamp," says Laughton.
Cambridge County Council is now taking over leadership of the
Nomad project and is in discussion with suppliers over sponsorship
so that it becomes self-funding.
Local government and the police are leading the way in the
public sector when it comes to using mobile technology, according
to Ovum analyst Elsa Lion.
More than 100,000 police staff are using Airwave, the voice and
data network that has replaced the outdated analogue police radios.
Airwave enables mobile data applications, and some forces have
already begun using the network to allow officers on the beat to
scrutinise databases of known criminals.
Health care could also benefit from mobile technology,
particularly in large hospitals where doctors could use laptops to
connect to patient records via wireless networks. "However, the IT
department needs to tread carefully. Doctors can be untouchable in
hospitals, so you must overcome barriers by convincing the end-user
that this is not just for management, but to help them do their
job," says Lion.
Nuneaton's George Eliot Hospital Trust has started doing just
that. It has distributed tablet PCs to 20 of its clinicians,
including consultants doing ward rounds. The deployment, which has
been paid for by Intel as part of a mobile pilot project for the
£6.2bn Connecting for Health national IT modernisation programme,
enables clinicians to access the hospital's proprietary pathology
and radiology applications.
Software supplier Indigo 4 adapted the applications so they
would work on thin client devices. Shaun Mountford, the hospital's
deputy chief executive, believes it has cut about four hours from
each clinician's working week.
Yet in central government barriers can be more intractable, says
Lion. Although the Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs, and HM Revenue and Customs could benefit from employees
being able to interact with central systems while on the move,
management is slow to change. "It needs strong leadership.
Management needs to take the initiative and free up the funds to
invest in the technology. The more central the function, the more
difficult it is," she says.
In which case, despite earning a reputation for poor technology
delivery, it is local government that is leading the way in the
adoption of mobile technology in the public sector.
Nomad projects that have delivered benefits
The improvements witnessed by Project Nomad and the
"transformation" concept:
- Efficiency savings of up to 47% were delivered through a change
of process, places and technology demonstrated by the Electronic
Financial Assessments project led by Cumbria County Council.
- Successful cross-agency working and information sharing
capabilities have increased the ability of service providers to
respond to the needs of more citizens in a real time environment as
shown in the Single Assessments project led by Cambridgeshire
County Council.
- Local authority members have the ability to eliminate the time
delay in reporting citizen issues by having access to mobile
technology and a new reporting process, as successfully
demonstrated by the Citizen to Councillor Interactions live project
led by Sheffield City Council.
Case study: Havering uses Mobile Social Care software
and tablet PCs
In 2004, Havering Council launched an upgrade to its social care
and housing systems as part of a joint project designed to provide
a more efficient and cohesive service to clients.
The council's existing social care system was ageing and ill
equipped to handle new legislation such as the Single Assessment
Process and the Supporting People Initiative. Traditionally, care
workers had filled out paper assessment forms while on client
visits, entered only basic information into the existing system and
spent large amounts of time faxing information around the
borough.
To resolve this the council piloted Anite Mobile Social Care
software. Seventy social workers have tablet PCs on which they
input assessment information while with the client. It allows them
to schedule client visits before returning to the office.
Anite Mobile Social Care also gives care workers access to
corporate policies and procedures while in the client's home, which
would have been impossible to carry around in paper format.
Capturing digital signatures allows the care workers to validate
the completed assessment forms on the spot, and if necessary forms
can be printed on site.
Even though the current system is not mobile in terms of
wireless connectivity, it has delivered huge benefits, says project
development officer Jan Fen. "Before they would have to fill in the
form on paper and then type it all back in again to the system once
they were back in the office. What now takes one or two hours would
once have taken three or four hours. These are real time
savings."
The council is now including the local primary care trust in the
scheme. It has 21 tablet PCs and is in the process of training
staff.
The project team is also piloting a version of the system using
wireless 3G connectivity in the tablet PCs. Once it has security
approval from the IT department, the team will start piloting the
new system with a select group of users.