A July 2013 Deloitte University Press article shared the following 5 ways for how mobile application deployment can improve the productivity of government mobile workers:

• Reduce time spent on data entry
• Enable better situational awareness for frontline employees
• Enable work from any location
• Improve accuracy and reduce the effort involved in performing tasks
• Enhance collaboration and data sharing among employees/agencies

Depending on the workflow of the job being performed, the Deloitte article suggests as much as a 45% improvement in productivity for the workers involved. The Deloitte article focused on workflows for caseworkers, emergency responders and the police. At 14 Oranges we have focused on mobile applications for inspectors as our primary target market based on our work with the BC Safety Authority, an agency that performs inspections on all manners of electrical and mechanical devices, including boilers, elevators and amusement rides. Our Mobile Workforce Management Service addresses each of the five key value points above with the following feature sets:

• Deliver simplified, customizable forms to mobile inspectors for rapid data entry
• Provide heads-up maps for managers and inspectors to find the next inspection site
• Complete workflow and schedule visibility in both offline and online modes
• On-device data validation and required data enforcement
• Push notifications to field workers with important updates

Our experience with the BC Safety Authority points to a 40% improvement in productivity, and an improvement in the job satisfaction of the mobile workforce. Being able to do a job well apparently makes a job more pleasant! Who would have thought that!? Not to mention the added benefit of being able to serve more businesses and the public in a given day helps to highlight how government processes, no matter how onerous they appear, don’t have to take forever to complete.

Any a happy, well served public tends to re-elect their officials! Food for thought if your council is up for re-election this year.

Both Sylvain and I will be attending the GMIS Event in Atlantic City at Caesar’s Palace, starting on Monday August 14, 2015 and look forward to sharing our solution with CIOs from across governments in the US next week. See you there!