Mobile computing taking off in Europe

I love articles like this one from Belfast Telegraph where they talk about the impact of mobile computing and how businesses are taking advantage of the technology to lower their overall operating costs.

Mobile ICT is an area that is going to become increasingly important in the coming months and years.

Analysts IDC (www.idc.com) reckon that before this year is out, two out of three employees in Europe will be engaged in mobile working in one form or another.

It is a technology that small and medium sized enterprises can use to punch well above their weight in the marketplace.

Local authorities have been perhaps the most enthusiastic adopters of the new possibilities offered by the technology. Finding themselves, like all public sector bodies, in the position of having to make substantial efficiency savings by a target date of 2008, UK councils have turned to mobile working as a way of making some of those savings.

Making data available to staff on the move means that, for example, social workers do not have to return to the office between appointments to collect paperwork. Crucial information can be shared between agencies when the arrangements for a particular service are a bit more complex. To use just one illustration of this, Cambridgeshire County Council (www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk) introduced a single system to meet the care requirements of older people in its area, linking its own social services department with other health providers. Using a hand-held tablet PC, staff were able to access or add relevant information in a particular case to the database on each home visit.