by Bob Platt*
There’s plenty of press and hype around smartphones and the hundreds of thousands of apps that people can load onto them. But how does all this relate to the business of Local Government?
Well, there’s no doubt smartphones and internet capable mobile devices will change the nature of interactions with councils. Regardless of whether you’re servicing ratepayers or staff, mobility has enormous potential for productivity gains.
But even though these are commonplace devices, the business challenges can still be significant – so where do you start?
As an example, consider the current mobile ‘app outbreak’ already beginning to appear from many traditional software vendors to the Local Government sector.
Taking a step back, this current ‘app outbreak’ can be compared to what plagued many organisations from the late 1980s for periods of 10 years or more as stand alone PCs made their way into workplaces.
Years on, does it make sense to have a stand alone mobile app for library systems, another for assets, yet another for inspections and reports or DA tracking? Each one looking different, navigating differently and, at best, performing differently on different devices or, at worst, working on some and not on others.
Yes Councils definitely should be looking at mobility. But if we’ve learned anything from the past 20 years it’s that we should be looking at the opportunity of mobility from an architectural or middleware perspective.
Providing a mobile single point of entry that intelligently combines any range of data sources and makes this information available on any device is really the goal.
*Bob Platt is Manager Information Management at Wyong Shire Council.
