It feels like my feet have hardly touched the ground over the last couple of weeks.  We’ve had the project board, some excellent progress with Kirona, Civica and in Barnsley with our VPN solution, and we’re gearing up for a technical meeting in Sheffield, to lay the foundations for a sustainable approach to mobile technology there.  In between, we’ve somehow managed to find time to visit the Nomad regional event in Manchester, and are getting ready for a trip up to Edinburgh this week.

Dashboard and Script Developments
I spent a day across at Kirona’s headquarters in Alderley Edge this week, working through our development plans in the run up to Christmas (only five shopping weeks to go).  I asked Lisa O’Neill (Kirona’s Project Manager) for her views on progress:

“Kirona are well under way with the development of ReGS for Barnsley and Sheffield. A beta production of the motile dashboard was released to the pollution team on 6th October 2006 and although there are some snags and adaptations required overall we were happy with the relatively few number of issues that were highlighted. A big thank you to all the pollution team for their patience and efforts over the last few weeks. All the issues raised will be addressed and fixed before the first official version of the dashboard is released into Barnsley and Sheffield.

The beta version of food hygiene is under development and we are hopeful that this will be available by mid December to release out to the food safety teams in both authorities for testing and feedback. The Kirona technical architect is due to meet with the other four teams in the next couple of weeks to cover the processes in more details so that a specification can be drawn up in line with the proofs of concepts and distributed into the Kirona development pool ready for work to commence by the beginning of December on the next module.”

Civica Developments
The ReGS project aims to deliver a mobile working solution integrated with the back office systems that we use in Barnsley and Sheffield, and we’d struggle to deliver this without effective back office integration.  To that end, we’ve made some good progress in our work with Civica, suppliers of the APP system (formerly known as Flare).  We’ve identified five database connectors (APIs) needed to integrate our proof of concept eScripts with the data held in our back office systems. 

The latest from Civica is that appropriate resources are being made available to support their installation.  Meanwhile, I’ve the unenviable task of describing our requirements to the two councils’ IT providers, in a way that both explains what we are trying to do, and fits their technical requirements.  Hopefully by the time the next blog entry is written, I’ll be able to provide a clearer description of how it all fits together.

Printers
One of the keys to breaking the reliance on the office for our staff was the ability to deliver an end-to-end service, whilst working in the field.  We are confident that the intelligent scripts and dashboard deal with the collection of information, and interaction with the office admin processes, but leaving information with customers has proved a little trickier to solve.  Should we assume most of our customers or clients can receive information by email, or do we set up a system for office based staff to post out documents as they were needed?  Although both these options remain, we’ve discovered some extremely neat battery powered, Bluetooth-driven printers.  Made by Pentax, they’re light, small, and fit in the cases alongside the tablets that our staff are using.

Although at first the thermal paper used (not dissimilar to the old fax paper) seems expensive at 12 pence a sheet, when you factor in the costs of ink or toner, they are much more competitive – my sums suggest an inkjet print costs around 30p, 5p for laser (which aren’t exactly portable), and 14p for the thermal printers once you include purchase and consumables costs.

Nomad Regional Events
As mentioned previously, we’re visiting each of the three Nomad Autumn Regional Events (described elsewhere on this site), to outline our progress, and demonstrate the use of the dashboard and scripted modules as we plan to use them in Regulatory Services. The event in Manchester was both well organised and attended, with interest not only from other services similar to ours, but from social care, building control, benefits and other backgrounds.  The range of questions raised certainly suggests a broad interest, at a variety of stages, and quite a few enjoyed the opportunity to play with the technology too.  Next week we’ll be in Edinburgh, followed for me by a long weekend!

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