Government Technology

Environmental performance across government is firmly on the political, social and media agenda. Local authorities in particular are faced with both the opportunity and the pressure to set an example and act in the pursuit both of long-term sustainability, while also being mindful of current issues such as strongly fluctuating fuel costs.
    
These are a unique set of circumstances, dictating radical change across a very wide range of local authority activities, processes and policies. Yet in some key areas the pace of change has been slow. With reductions in carbon output at the heart of the whole debate, it has surprisingly been the private sector that has moved more quickly in the use of technology to reduce amount of carbon produced by their workers operating on the move.

Local government
Looking at local government specifically, there are a huge range of job functions and activities to which mobile and flexible working technology could be applied to significantly reduce environmental impact. These range from social services activities, environmental services and building control to home care, parking services and housing – the list is almost endless.
    
What they have in common is the potential to optimise how job schedules are organised and as a result by how much the overall amount of travel undertaken to carry out the jobs can be reduced.
    
Field workers perform vital roles across the country for local authorities – many of them travel a great deal to perform their duties. The adoption of mobility technology can radically improve efficiency of these remote workers, and as a result eliminate unnecessary journeys, save very large sums in fuel and reduce the amount of paper used in day-to-day activities by a huge amount.

Wide reaching benefits
In practical terms, this approach to field mobility works by connecting office-based systems with remote workers in the field, typically via Windows Mobile handheld PCs or laptops. Organisations often approach the subject of mobility from a broader perspective than just environmental performance alone. Today’s mobility service solutions provide a mobile platform to enable businesses to communicate information in real time, wirelessly to their mobile workforce. They are used to deliver a broad range of benefits, from eradicating the costs and inefficiencies associated with paperwork, driving consistent adherence to business processes, to ensuring the protection and safety of lone workers in the field.
    
Focusing on the environmental aspects in particular, one recent private sector example offers an exact illustration of what can be achieved. By deploying a field mobility solution with fully integrated satellite navigation, this organisation was able to make more efficient use of their workforce and considerably reduce the average miles covered per job, resulting in a staggering saving of 3.6 million miles per annum. This equates to a carbon reduction of 1,159 metric tonnes of carbon per annum, or the equivalent of 26,953 light bulbs being left on for a year. The company was also able to remove 1.5 million pieces of paper from their business annually, equating to a saving of 17.5 trees’ (60 feet high) every year.
    
Previously, the paper was shredded then incinerated resulted in the production of 7.2 metric tonnes of carbon, or the equivalent of 171 light bulbs being left on for a year.
    
While the use of mobile phones is practically ubiquitous among field workers, effective and efficient use of broader mobile technology is another matter altogether. Yet the environmental and ‘business’ impact of using mobile technology to make improvements can be considerable, and they are by no means mutually exclusive objectives. But for local authorities, the adoption of mobility technology to capitalise on these opportunities and it’s not just environmental benefits, but performance and service improvements has been less rapid.

Barriers to success
Research carried out by The Mobile Data Association into this precise area found that although many local authorities were seeking to pursue additional mobile and flexible working options, there remained some general barriers to success. In particular, getting projects from the pilot phase into full use has provided ongoing difficulties across the UK and as a result there are still relatively few really strong examples of mobility technology in use within local government to the benefit of the environment.
    
The research revealed that awareness and support for the concept clearly exists across local government. Only around one respondent in five thought that flexible and mobile working would have no significant positive environmental impact.
    
On the other hand, there is a discrepancy between environmental benefits predicted by people before projects are implemented and by those responding after pilots or projects are in place. In places, this gap is huge: for example 60 per cent of people expect flexible working to ease transport congestion before programmes are in place; compared with 12 per cent afterwards. (As local authorities generate only a tiny proportion of congestion, both figures may be optimistic).
    
The percentage of those reporting environmental benefits from actual projects is still significant, however. More than a third of respondents say that office space is reduced for example, which is impressive despite the fact that predictions beforehand were even more hopeful.

Best practice
At present, there are just a few very good examples of local government leading the way. The London Borough of Lewisham has been a strong advocate of using mobility technology for environmental and service benefits for a considerable time.
    
The borough employs 200 craft workers such as plumbers, carpenters and electricians, who deliver planned maintenance and repairs for 30,000 homes across the region. Each day, these workers had to drop into the depot at least once in order to pick up their job allocation sheets - a process that could take up to 45 minutes.
    
Lewisham approached Microsoft partner and systems integrator TBS Enterprise Mobility to help. TBS uses Microsoft technologies to create its wireless offering, TaskMaster – a client application that delivers enterprise information to field workers using wirelessly connected Microsoft Windows Mobile-based devices.
    
By implementing a mobility solution based around TBS’ approach for its building and maintenance craft workers and replacing the previous job allocation and paper-based processes, the council has saved an estimated £6,000 per year in reduced paperwork and over £5,500 in fuel costs.

Award winning solution
In simple terms, instead of going into work every day to collect their paper-based job schedules, which have to be returned later for processing, the craft workers receive optimised job schedules directly to their handheld PDA and visit each site in the most efficient order. The mobility solution provides the intelligent communication to and from each worker, saving time, unnecessary travel and masses of paper. Their work hasn’t gone unnoticed; the project became an award-winning example of best practise when it won a Microsoft People Moving Business Award.
    
While research can provide the insight into the reasons why, ultimately there needs to be an acceleration of effort from within local government to adopt what is now proven and affordable technology in order to directly address these headline issues of long term sustainability and immediate fiscal benefit.

For more information
The Mobile Data Association www.themda.org
TBS Enterprise Mobility: www.tbsmobility.com