Enterprise Mobility Summit 2013: 'We've been failed by our suppliers' says BYOD project lead, Cambridgeshire CC

Solution suppliers are not offering enough choice, agree IT leaders

Cambridgeshire County Council BYOD project lead and IT strategy and architecture manager Alan Shields delivered a damning verdict on suppliers of public sector mobility solutions today, claiming the council has been "failed by our suppliers".

Speaking on the mobile strategy panel at Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2013 today, Shields said that when suppliers "do come up with mobile solutions for us, it's invariably on a dated platform".

"I think we've got a maintenance system that's based on Windows Mobile 6. Where's their thinking there? Equally, I ‘d say there's probably one app that can relate to just one of our systems on the Apple Store that might be of some use to us."

Shields said the public sector is being short-changed by inflexible technology on offer from suppliers.

"People want to be able to use personal devices of their choice, but suppliers will say ‘We've got this great mobile system but it runs on an XP tablet' or ‘We've got one that only runs on proprietary hardware'."

To illustrate his point, Shields said a colleague working in health at Cambridge had to "carry two devices around to access two different systems; that's getting really silly".

Shields issued a plea for suppliers to start "taking integration with APIs and mobility seriously".

"I'm currently left with limited choice or no choice at all," he added.

Shields' fellow panellists from the private sector agreed that choice is still an issue, with Philip Van Enis, group IT director at property consultants Bidwells, remarking:

"For us, there's no question that we're at the tip of the iceberg with mobility; it's changing the way we work and we're coming off the desktop to work with tablet devices we have. That's had an impact on every other technology we look at."

Van Enis has chosen largely an iOS-based infrastructure to underpin Bidwells' mobility plans, which is of critical importance when choosing software providers.

"We ask, ‘What are your integration plans? And that's from the point of view of ‘Do they understand where the future may be?'. And some just don't see it coming at all, which is really interesting. So it's about needing an API we can use to build our own solution, and push it onto devices."

Van Enis said that how mobile devices are used at Bidwells has so far been "a bit of a slow burn", and he expects the dearth of choice in software solutions means the company will "more likely in later years build our own mobile solutions".

Nathan Hayes, IT director of law firm Osborne Clarke, agreed that progress is "about maturity, really".

"It's important from our perspective to see a strategy in deployment. It is frustrating to see the quality of some of the applications."

Keep following today's summit here on Computing.co.uk, or on Twitter under the hashtags #ctgsummit and #mobility.