If you live in Swindon, you may soon find that the council deals with problems such as potholes, fly tipping and graffiti far more quickly thanks to mobile technology.

Swindon Commercial Services (SCS), the spin-off service arm of Swindon Borough Council, is responsible for providing traditional council services such as street cleaning, waste and recycling, highways, grounds and housing maintenance, as well as external commercial work won through open tender. Rob Fyfe, SCS’s IT business development director, is a firm believer in the potential of mobility to improve the organisation’s efficiency.

SCS has deployed a mobile system from BT and Consilium Technologies, and Fyfe says the organisation is seeing considerable benefits. “The heaviest user of mobile devices at the moment is our housing division,” he says. “They’re not just using it for sending electronic copies of job cards to employees, but as a resource management tool to send jobs out one-by-one or just in time. When a person completes a job, they’re sent the next best job for them, their current location and their skills.

“As a result, they’re more relaxed because they don’t feel they have a pile of jobs to complete and they get more work done. In addition, I need fewer resources in the back office because I have a system that automatically processes information.”
At the moment, only 60 of SCS’s 1,200 staff use handheld mobile devices, but Fyfe sees plenty of opportunity to expand, into other services such as litter collection, abandoned vehicles and street lighting.

“There’s an awful lot of potential for handheld mobile devices,” he says. “For example, we’re looking at the ability to have a surveyor who can stand on top of a pothole, next to an abandoned vehicle or whatever, press a button and send a response back to the back-office systems, pinpointing his location, along with a photo of the work he’s spotted. That data will then populate our systems instantly.”

Fyfe believes his plans are even more ambitious, saying there is no reason why managers and council members using mobile phones to access diaries and emails can’t also use devices to help improve services more generally. “Those devices have cameras and GPS so if they spot graffiti, potholes or whatever when they’re out and about they can quickly register them with a single button-press,” he says.

The challenges involved in making such systems work effectively, says Fyfe, are ensuring simplicity for users and, crucially, deploying an effective system at the back end. “Handheld devices are a great step forward but the real leap is getting the back-office systems to understand the information coming in from these devices,” he says.

As to the future, Fyfe is looking to make use of developments such as social networking and ubiquitous wireless access. “I believe these will have a big impact. Like most businesses, we’re looking at reducing property estates and increasing remote working at home and out in the field,” he says.