Intelligent Government

Guest post by Randy M Starr, VP of Technology, Blue Dot Solutions (an Infor Solution Partner)

Think about this for a moment: The Smartphone that you can buy for $200 at the nearest electronics retailer probably has more processing power and memory than most of the laptops you could buy five years ago. Add to that a five-megapixel digital camera, a GPS receiver, high-speed wireless connectivity, and a suite of 250,000 applications, and there’s a truly amazing amount of power and potential in a device roughly the size of half a deck of cards.

Because of these extraordinary Smartphones, we’re in the midst of a mobile revolution. Facebook, one of the most heavily visited sites on the Internet, reports that over 40% of its users access the site through mobile devices and that such users are twice as active as non-mobile users. A recent IBM survey of technology professionals found that most of them expect mobile application development to outstrip traditional business application development within five years.

Public Sector is taking the initiative with new Smartphone-oriented products such as the Infor Hansen Mobile 311 solution powered by Blue Dot’s Advanced Mobile Platform. Infor Hansen Mobile 311 is an easy-to-implement, easy-to-use, crowd-sourcing solution. You can quickly create, submit, and review service requests from your Smartphone directly into the appropriate municipality’s Hansen 7 or Infor Hansen 8 instance. Through the tiny technological wonder of the Smartphone, you get more high-value information such as GPS coordinates and photographs that aren’t nearly as easy to gather through web applications or call centers. Submitted service requests go to a "cloud-based” service layer that processes each request and routes them to the appropriate Infor Hansen instance, eliminating the need for on-premise server infrastructure or support. Other exciting advanced mobile applications are on the way.

Think about the Smartphone that you have. What public sector tasks and processes do you see as migrating from the PC to your phone? What mobile applications are your employees and citizens asking about? How do you think Infor Public Sector can take best advantage of the Smartphone revolution? Let us know what you think.