Dorset County Council Spearheads Mobile Working Efficiencies in Street Works Inspection and Rights of Way Management.

Dorset is a predominantly rural county in the south of England. It has a permanent population of around 720,000 in an area of 2,653 square kilometres (1,024 sq mi) but this increases seasonally as it's coastal location and natural beauty draws 18 million annual visitors.

Best known to many outside the UK as the birthplace of the author Thomas Hardy. The county town is Dorchester, known to many around the world as the setting of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, and is here that the County Council has its headquarters.

The two areas spearheading the deployment of mobile working are Street Works Inspection and Rights of Way management.

The role of the Street Works inspection team is to observe the state of the County's roads and identify those areas in need of maintenance or repair. An important aspect of this is to allocate a priority to each fault they find to ensure the most severe defects are attended to before they become too expensive to repair, or cause damage to vehicles and inconvenience to road users. Likewise, lower priority repairs can be scheduled for whenever a road repair crew are due to be in the area. The council has undertaken to achieve fixed service levels for repairing high priority defects and so correct assessment and priority setting is vital to ensure SLAs are met and costs are controlled.

Hitherto the inspection and reporting of issues was a paper-based task requiring back-office administration staff to collate reports and schedule work. As is common with such paper-based systems there was scope for duplication and also a delay in processing as field reports were only received when the inspectors returned to the office. The first stage of automation was to create a central database of all reported issues. This certainly reduced the duplication but still required back-office staff to key in the data.

As part of their e-Government initiative Dorset County Council have provided an online service where citizens can report potholes and other road defects. This has helped the council enormously as they become aware of issues much faster than they would in the course of a routine inspection period. However, one trend which has been observed by the Council is that the majority of citizen reported defects are incorrectly claimed to be high priority and as these so distort the priority and scheduling of repairs leading to unnecessary and unexpected cost.
With a growing database of fault and repair information at HQ, the Street Works Inspection team required more immediate access to this information, and also a faster way of reporting new faults. Mobile access to the data was required and so the team have been equipped with Panasonic Toughbooks from which they can access the Street Works information wirelessly using GPRS or Wi-Fi where available.

The Rights of Way team comprises three officers collectively responsible for the management of 3000 miles of footpaths, bridleways and other public rights of way. Their task is to ensure that all signage and equipment (gates, styles, grids) are well maintained, as well as ensuring that farmers are not blocking access and that little used routes are kept free of overgrown plants. For years these tasks had been achieved by marking changes and updates onto paper maps which each officer carried with them. Before the information could be used by anyone else, these markings then had to be transferred onto a central map back at the office. This required the officer to return frequently to HQ and spend time copying data between the field map and the master.

The team decided they would be more efficient if they could reduce the time and frequency they needed to return to base, giving them more time to spend - literally - in the field. Mobile working was the key to achieving this and the project to achieve this is currently at the end of its second phase.

The first phase was to provide the team with a mobile computing device on which all the county maps could be loaded. These maps were then marked up with right of way data which the officers can update while in the field. Use of Global Positioning System (GPS) data captured in the field also enabled the team to improve the accuracy of reports. In the first phase this information could be transferred easily onto the master map without duplication of human effort, although it did require the officer to return to HQ for the transfer to take place. The master map is now a web-based service which is accessible from any browser.