London’s largest public sector institutions announced today that they are working together to make London a “centre of excellence” for wireless technology and have formed a consortium aimed at positioning the city as Canada’s leader in mobilizing municipal operations.
The City of London, Fanshawe College, London Fire Services, London Hydro, London Health Sciences Centre, London Police Services, St. Joseph’s Health Care and The University of Western Ontario’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry will be working with Research in Motion (RIM) to utilize the BlackBerry Wireless Solution, including software, hardware and service. From dentists and professors to firefighters and police officers, the institutions have committed to getting BlackBerry into the hands of frontline employees.
“The formation of this consortium recognizes the advantages of handheld, wireless technology, the strength of RIM’s product and the benefits – including financial – that we realize by working collaboratively,” said Jeff Fielding, London’s Chief Administrative Officer. “We believe we can create efficiencies within our organizations, change how we deliver services and gain a return on investment.”
“The BlackBerry solution has been deployed by millions of users in corporations and government organizations around the world. We look forward to working with London’s largest public sector institutions to help build the city’s wireless communication infrastructure, enabling improved response times, cost-savings and productivity gains for the city of London,” said Jim Balsillie, Chairman and Co-CEO at Research In Motion.
While each of these institutions has already deployed a significant number of BlackBerry devices for wireless e-mail, the consortium intends to go beyond wireless e-mail and provide field employees with a broader solution that can generate additional workflow efficiencies, such as ticket and alert tracking, location-based services and inspection applications.
For example, London Fire Services is piloting a custom-designed application for completing fire inspections in the field using BlackBerry. Extremely paperwork driven, fire inspectors were previously required to fill out long forms in the field and bring them back to central offices for processing.
“The ease of use and portability of Blackberry provides us with an excellent opportunity to mobilize processes that would otherwise need to be performed in an office,” said London Fire Chief John Kobarda. “We are very excited about the efficiencies we will gain as a result.”
Recognizing the outstanding benefits of BlackBerry in emergency response situations, London’s Emergency Operations Team including London Fire Department, London Police Services and other City officials will be utilizing BlackBerry to pilot an “Incident Communications and Control” application from Wallace Wireless. This application provides a complete enterprise command system for business continuity and disaster recovery. It allows all team members to stay informed of incident status and enables the availability of up-to-date and accurate crisis management plans on the BlackBerry device.
Clinical and administrative leaders at London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care have been participating in a two month pilot aimed at analyzing the value of productivity and return on investment of handheld technology in a medical setting.
Fanshawe College is using BlackBerry to improve response times for information technology support within high technology classrooms. By linking the trouble ticket systems to BlackBerry devices carried by support technicians, urgent tickets are routed to appropriate staff without requiring operator intervention. Similarly, technicians are able to use the private radio features of the BlackBerry 7520™ to conference among themselves and with third parties to quickly resolve support issues. This improves productivity and reduces classroom downtime.
The City of London is developing a custom-designed application to expedite approvals for business licenses by allowing some of the approval processes to be completed in the field by the various authorities that provide required inspections and reviews.
Other consortium members are currently in the exploratory phase. The experiences of each consortium members will be shared amongst the partners in the effort to advance development cycles for their specific needs.
RIM has provided the consortium with technical advice and expertise related to BlackBerry and application development.
Any current costs associated with the initiative have been included in the operating budgets of each institution. Moving forward, the consortium anticipates that that it can leverage its combined resources to create costs savings when purchasing devices and service agreements as well as in the design and development of handheld applications.
* The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited.
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For more information contact City of London at www.london.ca or (519) 661-4500
