Qld council gets crafty with mobile data mining

South East Queensland’s Logan City Council has implemented a mobile strategy that assists the local council in data collection and deployment of business services.

The experimental council, with a population of 280,000, recently completed a trial with Rype, a Queensland-headquartered mobile and cloud integration consultancy, to provide a mobile data collection solution allowing Council inspectors to spend more productive time out in the field rather than being back in the office shuffling paper.

Council officers trialled two inspection forms, one for food premises and one for nuisance trees and used iPads as the device of choice but have endured that the system works across multiple mobile devices.

Working with BlinkMobile Interactive, an Australian Platform-as-a-Service provider, the council has now launched a service which enables the rapid creation and deployment of customised electronic forms that can be completed and uploaded to Council systems using a variety of commonly available tablets, phones and laptops.

The Blink Mobility Platform provide the capabilities to build and deploy many different mobile services allowing Council to simply extend mobile services to improve it customer focus and allow Council to receive customer requests online in real-time from a mobile customer.

During the pilot programme, Rype designed the processes and interfaces to take the critical inspection data recorded in BlinkForms along with the ability to upload it into Council’s Pathway system. The process ensured that a complete record of the inspection which includes photos and GPS would be saved in the enterprise document management system and synched automatically .

Logan City Council Chief Information Officer, Jim Barclay said it would look into rolling out the use of the mobile technology across all Council departments such as Development Assessment, Animal and Pest Services, Road Infrastructure Management and Parks where officers are required to be out in the field and report information back to Council. ®