In the context of the project “e-Administración” (e-Administration), with an objective of modernization and service improvement, there were many guidelines to improve internal mobility services inside the Public Administration. For that reason, the Information Systems Management of Barcelona City Council started to define what strategy should be implemented to expedite the response time and increase the efficiency of public employee that carry out their job in the street.

 

As result of this first analysis, the Information Systems Management of Barcelona City Council has defined the next steps:

 

n  High level definition about which municipal services were susceptible to use a Mobility platform, and once it was identified, to make a first estimation as the costs, timetable and functionalities that should be developed

n  Design of Mobility platform with all the components and infrastructure and to estimate the costs and schedule to implementation

 

Define which municipal services can be automated by a mobility platform will be able to:

 

n  Improve, in general, aspects the management of City Council internal process

n  Give operational benefits to the public employees in the moment that they need to access remotely the enterprise applications, to share information and to perform internal procedures regarding to their daily.

n  Save time in the public employees daily and increase their productivity

n  Guarantee protection of data privacy

n  Guarantee legal security of administrative procedures, implementing coding and  authentication policies where necessary

n  Methods cost reduction Design of Mobility platform with all the components and infrastructure, and to estimate the costs and schedule to implementation

 

Specifically, the first group where this kind of project was implemented was Barcelona Traffic Safety agents. The project started in the initial phase; with 30 mobile devices (PDA’s) that permitted evaluate the performance and usability of new system across the users’ feedback. After the good results obtained, there were implemented another 400 mobile devices to 1.500 agents. Nowadays, 1700 Traffic Safety guards in Barcelona are using 600 PDA’s with a system more complete that have included a many news functionalities.

 

The introduction of mobile devices in the Urban Guard of Barcelona has made possible to obtain the following benefits in different environments:

 

Urban Guard of Barcelona:

 

n  Reinforcement of the authority principle (notification)

n  Decrease of the weight that carries the agent (integration of resources)

n  Image of modernity

n  Improvement of the communication inside the organization

n  Training and capacity of consulting improvement

n  Efficiency improvement

n  Increase of anomalies resolution in the street

n  Reduction in errors in the introduction of the data of the complaints registered.

 

Town council of Barcelona:

 

n  Increase of the number of correct complaints

n  Increase of the quality of the data entered for future claims

n  Reduction in the general costs of administration

n  Maximization of the success rate of the notifications

n  Reduction in the risk of sanctions prescription

n  Optimization of the effects of the sanction pressure in general

 

In short, the implantation of the system of information for mobile devices to the Urban Guard of Barcelona was a first step in the mobilization of the municipal services of the Town Council that it has allowed to obtain an improvement in the agent’s daily operations, to optimize the management processes of the Town Council and to give a better service to the citizen.

 

At present, the implementation of the internal mobility corporative platform of the Town Council of Barcelona is being approached, as well as starting new projects of mobility (district inspectors, social agents, environment technical agents, etc).

Policy Context

The first of the initiatives of the route sheet of the platform of mobility was the project for Urban Guard, which context is detailed in the following lines about how the need was generated.

 

The Local Institute of Computer Science together with the Management of Security and Mobility, promoted the initiative of giving PDA mobile devices the Urban Guard agents.

 

This initiative was framed in the Strategic Plan of Systems 2004-2007 (SPS) of the Town Council of Barcelona, focused on promoting the development of society in net and facilitating the transformation of Town Council management processes and the service to the citizen, in particular it was identified as the 9.2 strategic initiative: Urban Guard- Mobile devices.

 

The goal of this initiative was to improve the efficiency and the service level of the Urban Guard by the use of mobile workstations (PDAs) that helped agents to perform tasks that they usually do in the city. The systems to implant would allow to speed up the processes of inspection and denunciation, as well as to improve street operations.

 

The four main blocks that were wanted to approach were:

 

1. Mobile office: agenda, e-mail and alarms
2. Territorial information: Interactive Urban guide with access to equipment, visualization systems and location by direction
3. ConsultingsRemote consultations and regulationsmanagement: access to the corporative information, reception and sending of incidences and action requests. Integration with other systems of the Urban Guard  of Barcelona
4. Sending on-line of complaints and incidences with pictures that would be managed through a central service

Optimization of the circuit of internal management of the sanctionative procedures

 

Description of target users and groups

The target collectives of this initiative are the municipal services that work in the street (policemen and firefighters, inspectors, agents and technicians, etc).  In total, it is foreseen by a potential collective of 2.500 public employees to put a total of 1.700 mobile devices inoperation.

 

The first project was for the Urban Guard agents. The body is formed by 2.500 agents and its main functions are the following:

 

n  Services on the public way: the purpose is to facilitate the normality of the traffic through the ordering and the regulation of the movements and parking of vehicles.

n  Interventions in traffic accidents: the purpose is to help and to brief the implied ones, to collect data and the evidence of the accident to be able to make the research and the statements pertinent, and to reinstate the traffic security and fluency.

n  Interventions that affect to drivers: affect persons who need the services of Urban Guard while driving a vehicle or in those situations due to behavior that generates forbidden actions or dangerous situations.

n  Interventions that affect to vehicles: regulation of the vehicle movements, the ordering of the parking and the intervention in traffic accidents, which have the purpose of reinstating or improving traffic security and fluency.

n  Road education: the goal is to improve the culture about circulation and to achieve safer behaviors and more respectful with the road regulations, through information and formation of the citizens, especially, school age population.

n  Inspections/checks: interventions that consist of verifying the fulfillment of the administrative demands, regulated through ordinances, regulations, edicts, etc, that govern in a determinate situation in force over activities in the public way, houses or locals, works, possession of animals, pyrotechnics, etc.

n  Surveillance of green areas: service destined to the prevention and/or correction of actions and inappropriate behavior in forests, public parks and other green zones.

n  Interventions of prevention of offence: interventions destined to avoid the commitment of faults or offences (penal offences).

n  Interventions of repression of offence: interventions that are generated when a criminal fault is committed and that have as an objective to discover the criminal, to stop hand to guardhim and also to look for the evidence of the offence and to protect it.

n  Administrative interventions of law and order: are those generated after the commitment of a not penal offence against citizen security or when other institutions request Urban Guard collaboration in some procedure’s phase that is beyond their responsibility (arrest control, eviction, precincts of locals, etc.)

n  Social actions: they have the purpose giving social protection to specific collectives like minors, old people, indigents, etc, in situations of need and in collaboration with social services.

n  Welfare actions: they have the purpose of helping and informing the citizen.

 

Due to the competences of this security team and to the fact that their daily operating was made manually with the consequent slowness oftheir internal processes, it was obvious the need to modernize this collective with an agile system that brought high efficiency.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

Previously the sanctionative procedure was not mechanized and data introduction to the corporative system of the town council was made in a manually, this provoked a high risk of erroneous data introduction and so much time correcting errors and formalitiesmanagement.

 

The Town Council of Barcelona facing this deficiency in the service bet for the application of new information technologies in mobility environments to improve all the tasks and procedures of the Barcelona Urban Guard.

 

The project was organized in three stages both at organizational and technical levels:

 

n  Pilot Stage

 

As the first measure, a set of sessions was carried out for identifying the basic requirements for the agents at functional level that could be included in the new system.  A committee was formed mixing representatives of the Barcelona Urban Guard, Town Council and specialist technicians in mobility environments.

 

As a key component of the system a study of market was carried out in order to evaluate the different mobile devices and more suitable printers to incorporate into the new system.

 

The result was the implementation of a pilot platform with 30 mobile devices and 10 wireless printers available for 100 agents.

 

This stage was a very important factor of success, since it allowed:

 

§ Evaluating new system’s behavior and identifying problems

§ Analyzing internal organizational changes both, operating logistical ones, derived from the implementation of the new system

§ Detecting new improvements to incorporate thanks to the feedback of the final users who participated during the pilot

 

n  Deployment stage

 

Due to the characteristics of the project and the different actors who took part, before and during the deployment in the rest of the agent collective, a series of activities was established to guarantee the correct performance of the set of the system:

 

o    Implantation logistics:

 

§  Adaptation of infrastructures in the different territorial units

§  Inventory managementOf the fleet of mobile devices

 

o    Procedure of distribution and configuration of the mobile devices.

o    Training plan

 

§  The chosen formula was to carry out formation sessions for agent trainers, proactive people and willing to use new technologies. Among theifunctions was to motivate the final users on the utilization of the new system and to reply to functional doubts about the mobile devices.

 

o    Follow-up and support after implantation:

 

§  As an important part of the continuity of the correct performance of the new system it was elaborated and started a support procedure for different levels capable of covering all the functional, technical and logistical aspects, identifying different roles in each case and establishing different answer typology.

 

n  Continuous improvement stage

 

§  Current stage in which is evaluated and implemented the new system improvement initiatives.

§  The key issue of this stage is a follow-up committee formed by representatives of Urban Guard, Town Council and specialized technicians who periodically meet and work together for:

 

·         Evaluating the new improvements proposals

·         Approving of the planning for the next periods

Technology solution

The solution used for implementing the system is based on the application of new information technologies in environments of application mobilisation. The system was developed for the customer on Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system with Microsoft technology (.NET) taking advantage of the synchronization of data that allowed the local data bases (Oracle Lite) with the traditional systems of BackOffice of the Town Council.

 

The system is prepared for working on-line, that means with coverage of GSM/GPRS net (enlargement of the corporative net (LAN) with GSM-LAN, and off-line, in spaces without net coverage, in this last case once reinstated the communication, the mobile device is synchronized automatically with the central system.

 

Moreover, Bluetooth communications between mobile devices (PDAs) and printers are used making possible both, municipal complaints printing and use of bank account cards in the case of on-line payments.

 

The system in general is formed by a client installed in the mobile device and a server part that is integrated with the different systems of the town council using standard web access services (Web Services) or XML exchange files.

 

The system is dimensioned to give service 24/7 to all the collective of the Barcelona Urban Guard, is prepared for bearing an approximate total of 1.000 mobile devices and 2.000 potential users. Nowadays, are being used a total of 600 PDAs and 1.700 agents with forecast of growth in the following years.

 

For this reason, the architecture that was proposed was to divide into different hardware all the integrating software of the information system, to achieve independence among applications, increase of process performance and resources consumption, offering levels of redundancy and suitable tolerance to assure the continuous availability of the system.

 

The components of the information system over mobile devices for the Barcelona Urban Guard are detailed below:

 

1. PDA mobile device: it has the customer application installed that the agents use in their daily operating. Until the end of 2008, it was used the Qtek 2020i model but at present the whole of the fleet has been renewed with more technically qualified HTC P6500.

 

2. Zebra RW420 printer: device that communicates with PDA through Bluetooth that allows the printing of municipal complaint and allows reading of the magnetic strip of the bank cards in the case of online payment by the infractor.

 

3. System of Communications:

 

                                          i.    GPRS LAN Network of Barcelona Town Council: communications network among the PDA mobile devices and the computer system

 

                                         ii.    GPRS Server: item in charge of receiving all the connections of the PDA terminals.

 

4. Core system:

 

                                          i.    MPS Server: it is the element that contains all the logic process of the system, receives all the information of the mobile devices generating several parallel processes with different transactions at procedural level as well as the access to the databases of the system (Oracle 10g) or other entities corporative ones.

 

                                         ii.    Oracle 10g Database/ Oracle Lite: computer system’s database.

                                        iii.    Web applications server IIS: Web environment server that includes an application to query the data of municipal complaints imposed through the PDA mobile devices. It allows the authorized agents placed in their territorial units to:

1.     The direct processing of the complaints to send anticipated notifications to the citizen

2.     Statistics queries

3.     Mobile devices users

Technology choice: Proprietary technology, Standards-based technology

Main results, benefits and impacts

Public employees, who developtheir activity on the street, carry out an important task for the citizen and, at the same time, it has a direct impact on the corporative systems of the Town Council of Barcelona.

 

For this reason, optimizing the operations in the street allows to speed up the internal processes of the Town Council as well as the reduction of time management and the possibility to provide the citizens a better service.

 

The main goal was to improve the efficiency and the service provided by agents through mobile workstations (PDAs), especially in the process of capture and sending municipal complaints and other added value services like having access to corporative information.

The main results and benefits that were achieved with the implementation of the new system were the following:

• Facilitating faster performances, without errors brought by the manual introduction of the information, data validation like the location of the offence occurred or the address of the infractor.
• Improvement of the incidence detection circuits in the public way and the answer capacity of the Barcelona Urban Guard agents.
• Reduction in the work of the Territorial Units on administration and treatment of complaints.
• Approximately a week in the different typologies reduction in average in notification time of the complaints.

• Reduction in the general Town Council expenses of administration (data introduction, sending of notifications, enforceable judgments procedure, expenses of distribution and maintenance)

• Reduction in the risk of prescription with sanction.

• Reduction in the time of resolution of the incidences in the street thanks to the immediate integration with the service of resolution of the incidences of the Town Council (IRIS).

• Increase of the efficiency in the introduction and procedure of the complaints through several ways to allow fast data introduction (validation of data, retrievalof previous complaints, retrieval of vehicle’s data, etc).

• Increase of the number of complaints processed correctly

• Increase of the quality of introduction of data for future claims.

• Increase of the success of the notifications.

• Increase of the probability of anticipated payment of the sanction thanks to the possibility to make it at the moment of the complaint.

• Optimization of the effects of the sanctionative pressure in general

• Reinforcement of the authority principle of the agents thanks to the on-site notification

• Decrease of the weight that the agents have to carry thanks to the resources integration.

• Improvement of the image of modernity of the Barcelona Urban Guard agents.

• Improvement of the communication with the organization thanks to the constant update of knowledge.

• Improvement of the agent formation due to the resources integrated into the mobile device.

• Increase of consultations through the accesses to other systems of the Town Council (documentation, action protocols, vehicles, etc).
• Improvement of the service to the citizen with the incorporation of the new system of support tools (urban guide, city equipments, information of interest, etc).

In short, the implantation of the new system of information over mobile devices for the Barcelona Urban Guard demonstrated to considerably improve the work environment of the agents as well as to obtain an important impact in the internal processes of the Town Council.

Track record of sharing

Thanks to the good results obtained with the implementation of the first project over mobile devices for the Barcelona Urban Guard, with 600 operating PDAs and more than 1.700 agents using the system, Barcelona Town Council wanted to take profit of the knowledge and experience acquired, as well as the technological basis, to approach new initiatives of application mobility in other municipal services of the Town Council. Management

The main goals pursued were:

Service level:

n   Select, identify and describe the opportunities of new susceptible services to be provided through a mobile device in a Mobility environment and through the most suitable technological solution

n   Know the current state and the needs of the different collectives interviewed on the Mobility subject.

n   Identify areas of the Town Council where it is more useful to apply mobility and where a better level of service is obtained.

n   Propose concrete technical solutions for each one of these opportunities in short, half and long term.

n   Gather the requirements for the new services of mobility as processes that can:

 

n   Improve in general Town Council internal processes management.

n   Offer operative advantages to the municipal services when accessing to the corporative applications.

n   Making possible a saving of time increasing the productivity of the public employee.

n   Ensuring the juridical security of the administrative processes, introducing encryption and authentication where it is necessary.

n   Outline the strategic direction to follow in mobility for the Town Council,

 

Technological level:

n   Achieving the integration of the different systems and applications that are used together at present or can be used together, with the mobility platform designing an information and management system model with the following features:

 

o    Flexible and parameterizable.

o    Open, that guarantees interoperability and reusability with third systems, so many at level of equipment, systems of information or commercial software.

o    Safe<A[Safe|Sure]>, offering the protection levels required.

o    To provide levels of availability and security requirements in environments more critical to the provided service.

o    Directed to<A[to|in]> the service promoting the access to the utmost through the mobile electronic administration.

o    Service-oriented maximizing access eGovernment mobile.

 

n   Defining a transition model or roadmap that:

n   Planning and functional evolution of existing technology systems.

n   Prioritize and plan for human resources, technical and economic need.

n   Promote the use of available tools and improved infrastructure investments already made.

n   Plan the various technological initiatives seeking consistency and economies of scale.

n   Evolved to adapt to new technologies and needs:

n   Adapting technology innovations selected from the predictable movement in the coming years.

n   Growing or declining in capacity and costs as required by demand from users.

 

At economic level:

 

n   Rationalize investment

n   Securing investment to ensure:

n   The use of the existing infrastructures

n   The durability of the new actions

n   Planning the roadmap according to a budget

 

The task after meetings with managers of the various sectors of the City Council was to identify a total of 28 potential initiatives and of those were analyzed the 24 most important initiatives. The result has produced an action plan for the coming years (2009-2011) that sets the stage and run projects to reach goals set by the City Council, the implementation of a mobile platform that integrates all services sectors could be provided through a mobile device.

Barcelona Urban Guard has conducted several workshops and ICT policies with other local, national and international, as well as participation in various fairs where he shared the experience of the project and its success.

Lessons learnt

One of the main problems that arose was the acceptance of the new system by the end users involved as major organizational changes and the rejection meant the failure of the project. With the preparation of a good internal communication plan and the active participation of end users with its new ideas and observations on the new system allowed the deal with the more reliable deployment and evolution of the new system.

Another problem was to validate the possibility to replicate the new information system on mobile devices for other groups who make their daily operations on the street. With minimal adjustment to adapt the system to the new operating group to make possible that new areas of the City Council could also work with mobile devices.

Finally, the investment made by the Barcelona City Council in implementing the new system was recovered in a short time, improving efficiency and service level of the agents of the Urban Guard.

Scope: Local (city or municipality)