Mobile working
26
Upwardly
mobile
Simon Creasey assesses the
current state of the market for public
safety mobile working, looks ahead
to its future and pinpoints what
organisations need to consider when
adopting the technology
The public safety technology market is booming.
According to IHS Markit, globally it is worth
just short of $16bn, and over the next ve years
it will enjoy double-digit percentagegrowth.
is is being fuelled by a number of
factors, ranging from public safety agencies replacing old,
obsolete systems to agencies bolting on new and emerging
technological advances to existing systems, such as articial
intelligence (see box on page 28) and predictive analytics.
While a lot of this growth is expected to be around the
use of cutting-edge body cams and unmanned robotic
vehicles and drones, it’s also anticipated that sales of mobile
working solutions – which historically have formed the
backbone of this relatively nascent market – will soar.
Historically the technology was mainly targeted at
replacing mundane administrative tasks that required
workers to come back to the oce and manually input
information. Its main aim was eciency improvements,
says Alex Kottoor, general manager at SceneDoc, which was
acquired by Tyler Technologies last year.
“If you take the average police ocer just about anywhere
in the world, a good part of their day is spent report-writing
and collecting information,” says Kottoor. “A, this places a
tremendous administrative burden on the ocers, and B,
it’s not simple to do. In addition, the criticality of having
information at their ngertips literally can be the dierence
between life and death, the dierence between securing a
conviction or having some person who should be in jail
on our streets. Our goal is to help ocers become more
ecient by oering mobile workow solutions and as a
result of that digital data collection they are now able to
share information in real time.”
SceneDoc oers products that assist ocers in the eld
with tasks such as evidence collection – including digital
evidence such as images, audio and video – and everyday
jobs such as ticket-writing. e technology is widely used by
law enforcement agencies in Canada and the US.
“Our customers are realising at least an hour of time
savings per ocer per shift,” Kottoor says. “It can be weeks
not years in terms of customers recouping their investment
through these new eciencies.”
Despite the promise of eye-watering savings, take-up by
some public safety agencies has been slow, due to a number
www.criticalcomms.com March 2019
/www.criticalcomms.com