Mobility, mobility, mobility how to save £21.5 billion

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) has today announced the launch of the first phase of a study investigating how local government can and must improve the delivery of services; principally through the adoption of mobile technologies. Since the Cabinet Office launched its Transformational Government strategy in November 2005, it has become clear that to deliver this and to achieve the target efficiency savings of £21.5bn by 2008, the adoption of ICT is essential.

The MDA’s initiative has been backed by the DTI and will be rolled out in a number of phases, in total taking an estimated nine months to complete. The ultimate aim is to foster a better understanding of the potential that mobile technology offers in the fulfilment of transformational government.

Speaking about the investigation, Ed Williams, director of Public Sector mobile technology for the MDA, said: “Mobile technology has rapidly become a success story in the commercial sector, with businesses of all sizes adopting mobile strategies, but the level of implementation in the public sector seems to have hit a wall in recent years. Our focus is to examine the reasons behind the slower adoption, to apply some of the learning from the commercial sector and establish an effective framework for mobile technology adoption.”

The first phase (between October – December) is a research programme which will individually contact senior officers and staff (19,000 names) in councils across the UK to ask them to participate. The objective will be to confirm known and perceived mobile adoption issues. The output will be a report identifying both the benefits that mobile and flexible working technologies can bring in delivering on the Transformational Local Government and Gershon efficiency agendas; and detail the perceived barriers to implementing such change. This report will be made available free of charge to all in the Public Sector. The target publication for this stage one report is January 2007.

The final phase will see the creation of a model Invitation to Tender (ITT) or blueprint to help other public sector departments approach mobile technology roll-out in the most effective way.

This is the first study of its kind that will look exhaustively at the potential for mobilising local government services and will be heralded as a turning point for future education and awareness. The only other complementary study has been the work undertaken by project Nomad whose research focuses on the benefits achieved by government departments that have already adopted mobile strategies.

The project is a joint initiative between the MDA, DTI and project Nomad, who have commissioned Informed Publications, Headstar and journalist and public sector expert Michael Cross to undertake the research.

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The Mobile Data Association is a supply-side, technology-neutral, Trade Association that is now in its 12th year of operation. We count all of the Mobile Network Operators as well as many content providers, aggregators and mobile data solution providers amongst our membership. We aggregate and publish the SMS texting figures each month as well as organising member events on various topics of interest and/or concern.