Victorian Councils to provide access to services by smartphone

Local councils in Victoria are actively reviewing IT strategies for mobilising ratepayer services according to a survey conducted by Blink Mobile at this month’s Victoria Local Government Technology Conference staged in Melbourne.

The survey found that 75% of local councils in Victoria are actively reviewing strategies which will enable ratepayers to access web-based information from their mobile device. At the same time, more than one in three councils (38%) in the state plan to incorporate mobile ratepayer services as part of their overall IT strategies over the next 12 months.

The survey found that up until now mobilising council information had not been a top priority with an over-arching perception that the process would be too complex. While 29% 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, the survey paints a different picture when it comes to enabling council staff to access intranet information from their mobile device. Ninety-six per cent of those surveyed believe that enabling field staff to use mobile phones or tablets to access and update intranet systems would add to workplace efficiency.

At the same time, the survey showed that 77% of council respondents 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’.

Last month, Brisbane City Council went live with its mobile ratepayer service, www.brisbanecity.mobi. In addition, south of the border in New South Wales, Tweed Shire Council ratepayers can also now access council information with a smart mobile phone at m.tweed.nsw.gov.au.

Darren Besgrove, Director of Blink Mobile, an Australian platform-as-a-service provider, 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 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.”

Frost & Sullivan forecasts that 62% of all devices sold in Australia will be smartphones by 2015, up from 2% in 2009 (Frost & Sullivan, 2010 Asia-Pacific Mobile Device & Smartphone Outlook).