Local councils keen to deliver info to smartphones

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 12:34

Business IT - Technology

Australia's citizens rely heavily on the services and facilities provided by local councils, and on access to information about those services. Councils embraced the Internet long ago. Now a survey suggests that they are gearing up to deliver to smartphones.

Last month, Brisbane City Council went live with its mobile ratepayer service, www.brisbanecity.mobi and Tweed Shire Council in NSW allows ratepayers to access council information from a smart phone at m.tweed.nsw.gov.au

And Blink Mobile - an Australian provider of a 'platform-as-a-service' claimed to enable the rapid development of mobile business applications - says that 75 percent of local councils in Victoria are looking at strategies that will enable ratepayers to access web-based information from their mobile device.

The findings come from a survey undertaken by Blink Mobile at this month's Victoria Local Government Technology Conference staged in Melbourne.

The survey also found that 38 percent of councils in the state plan to incorporate mobile ratepayer services as part of their overall IT strategies over the next 12 months, according to Blink Mobile.

Blink Mobile director, Darren Besgrove, said: "We're all hungry for information about where we live and work, whether we want to know about the latest traffic reports, which soccer fields are open, when the library closes or when our rubbish is being collected.

"At the same time, smartphones are becoming more popular and data plans are much cheaper, enabling people to converse and communicate with ever richer content. when it comes to all levels of Government it seems to be [local] councils who are more aware of the convergence in consumer behaviour and mobile technology capability, and how that will drive the mobilising of council information for the benefit of their ratepayers."

The survey found that, previously, mobilising council information had not been a top priority with an over-arching perception that the process would be too complex.

Blink Mobile said: "While 29 percent of respondents thought this was the case, an equal percentage of respondents also felt that accessing council information from their mobile device would be too expensive a process and offer a poor return on investment."

However, 96 percent of those surveyed said that enabling field staff to use mobile phones or tablets to access and update intranet systems would add to workplace efficiency, and 77 percent of council respondents said they would favour a single management platform to develop, deploy and manage all their mobile interactions across both ratepayers and staff, as opposed to multiple stand-alone mobile 'point solutions'.