Only a “tiny handful” of UK councils are making significant use of mobile technologies to transform services and generate efficiencies, a leading industry figure has told E-Government Bulletin.
Mark Armstrong, head of public sector at mobile network provider O2, told EGB in an exclusive interview that a range of factors are holding councils back from widespread mobile working in areas like social services and home-working.
The potential is there for social care workers to have remote access to care records; schedule jobs on the move; and for lone worker security systems to be implemented, Armstrong said. Greater efficiencies could also be generated from home working; mobile workflow systems; mobile access to management systems; mobile email and a range of other areas, he said. But only “a very small percentage – a tiny handful of councils” were integrating mobile access across social care, he said, and mobile penetration was lagging behind the private sector across the board.
No single factor is responsible for this lag, he said. “Social care involves many bodies, such as the primary care trust, and no two council systems are the same, they all start from different positions.
Implementation cost is another barrier, Armstrong said, and there are cultural barriers – though these are not confined to the public sector. There are also particular security considerations for public sector bodies in implementing mobile systems, he said.
But there are a few pioneers, and others will follow, Armstrong said. “No-one wants to be the first, so the lead time for acceptance is long, but once it is deployed, public sector bodies are very good at learning from each other.
“Use of mobile devices is going to be infinitely more pervasive in future – the number and type of application that is designed for mobile devices will be much greater and joined up together. At the moment, most areas are looking at one specific application but in the future, there is no reason why they should not be running 20 mobile applications at once.”
Armstrong was speaking to E-Government Bulletin ahead of next month’s council websites conference in which mobile web applications will form part of a closing plenary looking to the future of public sector services online (
http://www.headstar-events.com/councilwebsites09/ ).
