Mobilising on mobile - a tale of cost overruns
How successful have mobility initiatives really been thus far? Fleur Doidge examines three high-profile projects
"So would you be surprised to know that two weeks ago, when I went out on patrol with my police officers, they were using a paper A to Z to find out where they were going, and they had to go back to the station to fill in forms to record the incidents we had been to? Would that surprise you, given this programme?"
-- Jackie Doyle-Price, MP for Thurrock, to Home Office chief Dame Helen Ghosh, querying the latter's oral evidence in the inquiry
Doyle-Price, on a committee looking into the mobile technology in policing programme, was following up on a National Audit Office (NAO) inquiry that found an £80m initiative aiming to kit out frontline police with devices such as BlackBerrys and PDAs had essentially been a waste of money.
A disjointed, incomplete approach to a complex project requiring assimilation and accountability in some 43 police forces - already using at least 2,000 different applications - resulted not in the £125m of savings initially trumpeted, but in something of a scandal.
The Home Office's Mobile Information Programme, as it was called, ran from 2008 to 2010. Some £80m of central funding was distributed through the National Policing Improvement Agency to enable the purchase of more than 41,000 new mobile devices for officers, with £9m earmarked for management of the programme, central framework contracts and "benefits measurement".
The aim was to put more bobbies on the beat, increasing efficiency and effectiveness while reducing bureaucracy. The NAO report, though, discovered not only that implementation was patchy at best, but that some forces had 1.5 devices per officer while others had none. Some constables were spending even more time in the office post-implementation; others found that extra time outside averaged out at just 18 minutes. It also found that police had spent at least another £23m since 2008 on mobile tech initiatives.
"Twenty-two forces responding to our survey cited drawbacks with their mobile technology projects, including the speed with which forces were asked to roll out devices, low usage, technical problems or limitations, and lack of senior buy-in to the use of mobile technology," the NAO says.
Wrong focus
According to the public accounts investigation committee, the focus had been on delivering the mobile devices rather than considering how they could improve ways of working and reduce the £1.5bn spent annually on police IT - which is 10 per cent of the total annual police budget.
"Although some forces have used mobile devices to improve efficiency, the majority have not, and the department and the agency do not know what the benefits of the programme are. The measurement of benefits was only considered after funding had been distributed," it says. "So far, police forces have declared cashable savings of just £0.6m, less than one per cent of the amount invested."
And therein lies the rub. For despite the deafening vendor hype surrounding mobile technology, BYOD and all the rest of it, a simple Google search brings up a string of warnings about the potential mobile project problems in realising the longed-for efficiencies.
This turns out to be the reseller's problem, rather than the vendor's, for it is the reseller, systems integrator or IT services provider who will often get the blame when an implementation does not live up to customer expectations.
What's more, the committee on mobile policing registered an urgent need for the Home Office, and government in general, to protect itself from overselling and buy only what it really needs.
Slough MP Fiona Mactaggart told the inquiry, rather damningly: "What will happen in this process is that well-invested salesforces of clever mobile technology companies are going to intervene between the purchaser and the product. It is likely that they will determine, unless there is a very assertive centre, what is asked for."
Unsurprisingly, few resellers are prepared to talk about customers who have had less positive experiences. But advice columns and promotional pieces testify to the existence of potential issues regarding effective processes, real-world usability, hardware or software interoperability and cost.
Too keen to make sales?
Some problems may result primarily from inadequate education of the customer, perhaps being overlooked by suppliers over-keen to make a sale. That could be what happened at franchising giant Jim's Group (trading in four countries as Jim's Antennas, Jim's Mowing, Jim's Diggers and so on).
Jim's Group, headquartered in Australia, decided a few years ago to catch the mobile wave. As a franchise opportunity with 3,000 franchisees, all of whom are engaged in delivering handyman-type services on the go, the Group seemed the perfect mobility customer. It was decided that the iPad tablet would be adopted as standard, enabling franchisees to go paperless and cut back on administration costs.
However, they did not realise until too late that the chosen devices do not support standard office productivity functionality, such as Excel macros.
Jim's had two choices: either ditch Apple, or develop its own applications, for whatever that cost. The company chose the latter - not least because other mobile devices can suffer similar interoperability issues - and chose to supply it to licensed franchisees for free. Today they can download the Jim's Group workforce productivity suite for iPad or iPhone by Philology from iTunes, in four versions.
They eventually got the functionality they wanted, but only for significant additional cost. These costs presumably then had to be passed on to franchisees in one way or another - and some of them have recently been engaged in a class-action lawsuit against the Group regarding, among other things, increased franchising fees.
In the US, a mobile technology implementation for the 2010 census resulted in a tale of woe of far greater magnitude. Not only did the project not achieve its goal of saving costs through greater automation, centred on having staff adopt 525,000 GPS-enabled mobile handheld devices for collecting data in the field, but it ended up costing $3bn (£1.9bn) more - twice the original amount budgeted from an original census funding package of $11.5bn.
In fact, the 2010 US Census ended up being its most expensive ever, coming in at $14.5bn, and the government is still trying to get the system working for the next one, in 2020.
Robert Goatham, principal of Calleam Consulting, says in his August 2012 report into the failed 10-year project that the mobile vision was only realised in terms of checking people's location, not for following up citizens who failed to respond by post.
"So the mighty pen, paper and clipboard continued to play its role," he writes. "It appears that the management… fell into the trap of assuming that, because the business processes themselves were simple, the project itself should be relatively simple too. That attitude set the context… and resulted in a series of mistakes that ultimately snowballed."
Sound familiar? Goatham goes on to confirm that, in his view, the stakeholders completely underestimated the complexities of moving from a paper-based system.
The channel partner, Florida-based developer Harris, complained mid-project about the "unanticipated number of actual requirements" that appeared when the original request was broken down into detail. Other warnings were issued to the Census Bureau in situ, not least by the US Government Accountability Office, but were not heeded.
It should go without saying that any IT implementation must be fit for purpose. And it certainly appears that the risk increases along with the size and importance of the project itself. Potential and badly needed savings can be turned on their head, with the multiple facets of a project escaping accountability and control. What can be done to ensure it does not happen to your customers?