Mobile working
of factors. One obvious issue is nancial. “Police budgets
tend to be either at or declining,” says Kottoor. “But in the
same breath that provides an opportunity for mobile-rst
technology to assist agencies to do more with less.”
e second key thing that has prevented adoption and
innovation is cumbersome legacy systems. Traditionally public
safety systems have been heavy on-premise applications,
which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to deploy
and take years to roll out, so organisations tend not to look
to change them any time soon. As a consequence, a lot of
systems are ageing (some may even be no longer supported)
but it is a big commitment to bring in a replacement.
However, Kottoor says attitudes are slowly shifting, and he
can see a tipping point being reached sooner rather than later.
“ere are a subset of police chiefs and sheris who still
think mobile means a laptop in a car, albeit this is getting
better year after year,” he explains. “Public safety agencies
are just beginning to adopt the core technologies you and
I are used to using in our personal lives. Public safety is
just getting to the inection point where the smartphone is
going to play a key role in core police operations.”
It’s a view shared by David Robinson, police sector lead
UK and Ireland at Motorola Solutions, who says “the
question now isn’t should we do mobile – it’s why are we not
doing mobile?”.
Signicant recent advances in technology have helped to
sweeten the pill for some, but what is really helping to push
through an attitudinal change is cloud adoption.
A lot of governments are providing frameworks for how
public safety data can be hosted in cloud environments
for the rst time and, as a result, the market has seen an
explosion in the number of start-ups and mature companies
that are taking these applications and moving them to the
cloud. What’s also helped drive adoption is the usability and
eectiveness of mobile working solutions, says Robinson.
“Unless you can provide a solution which is making life
easier for a frontline ocer, it won’t get used,” he adds. “If
you’re just asking a cop to do the same thing, or even more
things, on a device than they would be doing on a desktop
computer or a notebook, it just won’t get used.”
at’s one of the reasons he says Motorola’s Pronto suite
– which is essentially a complete replacement for a police
ocer’s notebook and also gives them access to forms and
relevant online systems and databases – has been such a hit
with forces in the UK; Pronto is currently being used by 20
of the UK’s 43 police forces.
“I was with one UK police force a few years ago and
they said 80 per cent of all of the intelligence in the force
is walking around in people’s heads, and if they’re lucky 50
per cent of that intelligence makes it onto the system,”
saysRobinson.
Statistics like this are why we are starting to see more
agencies looking to implement mobile working solutions.
For many, a good starting point is to conduct a small-scale
trial, advises Chris Eccles, CTO of CoeusSoftware.
“Consider software-as-a-service solutions as these have
the lowest upfront costs,” he adds. “Look closely at the
processes you want to mobilise and see if you can optimise
them. Many legacy processes assume the use of paper forms
and can often be simplied, or broken down into smaller
processes. Look at every data item collected and review
There are a subset of police
chiefs and sheriffs who still
think that mobile means a laptop in a
car, albeit this is getting better year
after year
whether you actually need it.” Eccles points out that some
data can be collected automatically, such as location coordinates.
Another tip he oers is to examine how scalable
the solution is.
“Can I easily scale up the number of users and processes
that the solution supports?” says Eccles. “PoliceBox Coeus’s
police mobility platform, for example, has been deployed
successfully at a police force of about 30,000-plus users,
but technically the platform can support many millions of
users. When it comes to the number of processes that can
be supported, this is only dependent on the storage on your
device and can be at least several hundred processes.”
Due to the fast-changing nature of technology in this
sector, public safety organisations need to look at the
lifecycle of the devices that the mobile working applications
are running on, says Phil Sanders, public sector sales lead,
UK and Ireland at Zebra Technologies.
“A lot of our products and technologies are designed
to last over an eight- to 10-year-period, so customers
have to look at what their return on investment cycle
will look like,” advises Sanders. “We’re currently having
long conversations with many customers around Android
operating systems and how our product will be kept up to
date with the latest Android builds. e overall experience
of some of the accessory eco-systems around battery
management and things like that are also becoming very
important in discussions because most customers are
looking for a longer lifecycle out of that technology.”
While exploring the lifecycle of a mobile working
application, public safety organisations shouldn’t just
consider their immediaterequirements.
“Look at capability rather than specic functionality,” says
Eccles. “What future processes might you mobilise? Can the
solutions you are considering handle new requirements in
future, and at what cost? Can you dene your own processes
and to what extent are you reliant on the vendor? Some
projects fail because implementation cannot keep up with
changing requirements. Make sure the solution you choose is
agile and can cope with rapid change in a cost-eective way.”
is latter point is crucial because additional functionality
is being added to public safety mobile working solutions all
the time. A good example of this is biometrics.
“Biometrics is not a new thing, but its use in the eld
is becoming more prevalent because of the technology
enablement now – it’s much faster to upload information,” says
omas Lynch, executive director for security technology, safe
cities and critical communications at IHS Markit.
To this end, Motorola Solutions recently added access to
the UK Home Oce’s biometric services gateway to Pronto.
“So on your device you have the biometric services
application within Pronto, which means that if you stop
somebody and suspect that individual of having committed
an oence and given false identication, you can plug in a
March 2019 @CritCommsToday 27