The transformative effect of mobility on services
HP Ireland hosted a round table discussion on how mobile technologies are transforming the way we work and the way services are delivered.
How, when and where people want to work and consume technology is changing rapidly. How does this impact your workplace and employees?
Mark Lande
This is something we have been thinking about for about 10 years. With IT, staff and students are looking to do things for themselves. The traditional ways of students interacting with the university whereby they would have to queue up for a face-to-face interaction are becoming less and less. From a learning point of view students want to be able to interact outside the classroom. Initially the focus was on laptops and PCs, whereas we are now trying to support all types of mobile devices on campus. We have an open WiFi network and anyone can come onto campus and hook into our wireless network and start consuming all our services – we don’t distinguish between on campus or off campus. The IT function now sees itself as a service provider rather than a corporate firewall behind which all activity takes place.
Aeneas Leane
As part of our Garda Modernisation and Renewal Programme there are two key things in terms of mobility that will change our workplace. The first is about getting officers onto the front line. One of the barriers to this is that there are a lot of forms to fill in and that means going back to the station – there are security constraints that currently necessitate that but we are overcoming them. Essentially, if an officer is on the ground it is about getting them to engage with the community. The mobility tools will enable this with less need to return to the station. Technology is also playing a role in community engagement with text alerts and social media.
The other aspect is about smarter policing. Our mobility strategy is about pushing information out to officers. If they are patrolling a particular area, the relevant information is presented to them such as persons of interest with outstanding warrants. That is changing how we work and will free up more time for engaging with the local community. There is also a lot of back office work that mobility is changing. Within stations WiFi is important and has to be secure. That has enabled our support staff to move around between locations.
Gary Tierney
The trends in the technology industry are mobility, security, big data, cloud – ultimately this is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and there is a cost envelope around that. That has been relevant for the past 25 years and is still relevant whether you are in banking, the public sector, An Garda Síochána, a university environment dealing with students or collecting data from farmers. There has been a shift in power towards the consumer of IT services and the demands are increasing in terms of complexity and the speed at which things can be done. You will all have employees ask for a tablet when the organisation only ever used laptops. They can find new services online in their day-to-day life and they want that in their work environment. These expectations are mirrored in the workplace environment, and at the same time you are being asked to do things with less resources and reduced budgets.
I don’t think mobility is anything new; it is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time securely.
Sean Keevey
Mobile technology is central to agriculture with some of our staff literally carrying out inspections and tests in the field. We are also seeing increased demand for remote desktop access. We have a prescribed list of devices that we supply at the moment but the demand for other devices is growing. There is a constant discussion as to what is the best device to use in various circumstances and we are constantly trying to achieve the optimum balance between usability and support and cost. We also have private veterinary practitioners as partners who have their own mobile devices.
Health and safety is also an issue using mobile devices in the field and other locations.
John Burke
I can remember when people had bleepers and they got in their car and went into the data centre to solve a problem. These days that would be laughed at. Today people have email in their pocket and have remote access to their desktop and they can now resolve issues from home or indeed anywhere in the world. That has improved the capability of the IT function enormously, although it does impinge on people’s lives. Mobility can also help with staff retention as a lot of attrition used to be about location and now people can work from anywhere. That aspect of mobility has broadened the base from where people can work from.
The banking industry is aggressively rolling out mobile capability to customers and that has its own challenges. Security is important and the more you enable your customers the more you expose yourself. It is important that the systems are in place to secure customers money. It is a balance between getting capability out there and keeping the safe locked. The marketing of financial services is now a mobile event and many people now expect to be able to conduct their business from their location rather than go into a branch.
With more staff able to work remotely, what steps do you take to ensure your networks and data are still secure?
Aeneas Leane
We deal a lot with sensitive personal information with a lot of legislative requirements around it. Security is the number one issue for us, even if it sometimes means doing things a little slower, especially with introducing new technologies. We have standard security in place in terms of enterprise mobility management in the network and application layers. It is much easier with a PC than with a mobile device – there is a Garda on the front desk and no one can get access to it. With our mobile networks we have secured things with VPNs and any data is encrypted. If devices are lost or stolen they can be disabled and there is no data resident on the devices themselves.
John Burke
You need strong security policies so everyone is aware of their obligations. Security has to be kept front and centre and to acknowledge that there has to be censure if that is not the case. Depending on the data there should be varying levels of security, with access to servers the highest level.
Mark Lande
The security policy framework is important and there needs to education and training to accompany it. The best technology can effectively be defeated by an inadvertent lapse. The challenge in organisations with large numbers of people is to get that message out. There is a people aspect to security as well as a technical infrastructure aspect. We are investing in the skills of the IT security people and then propagating that knowledge and culture to the rest of the organisation.
Sean Keevey
There is a tension between the level of security and usability. For example, our mobile phones lock-out after one minute and some people find this cumbersome. But it is important to protect mobile devices in this way in order to prevent unauthorised access to the device should it be lost or stolen. Once a mobile is reported lost we can wipe it. It is very important for the organisation to have formal security policies in place. People must sign up to the conditions of use for any device and it is important that they are regularly reminded of their obligations with respect to these devices.
Up until now we have gone with Windows based devices and have found them to meet our needs very well. We do recognise that people want to BYOD and we plan to introduce an EMM [enterprise mobility management] product to facilitate this by the end of the year. Mobile is a challenge but it can bring a huge productivity boost to any organisation.
Mark Lande
We have a BYOD policy and therefore we have every piece of technology that is imaginable. The challenge is to ensure security when dealing with staff and student’s own personal property.
Usability expectations are always increasing as users expect any system to be as easy as booking a flight with Ryanair. BYOD can offer savings to an organisation. We are investing less in PC labs because students prefer to bring their own devices.
Gary Tierney
Security is important for all sectors but particularly for those that are regulated. Fortunately, this is something HP has been working on for a long time, and we now have an industry leading solution that secures data on every device from your PC, tablet to your printer. Technology is an enabler and the security around it must be policy driven and backed up with education. We see that in our own organisation with constantly having to force people to change passwords and to have strong passwords – that is the case in every organisation. More and more the challenge is the multi-form factor. It was reasonably easy to make a PC secure within a firewall; then it was about securing data on laptops and now we are dealing with tablets and phones with multiple OS [operating system] environments. In recent times we have seen the Internet of Things and things like air conditioning are now on the network and become an access point. This is changing how we think about IT systems and how we build them.
Aeneas Leane
There is a tension between security policies and usability. Getting that balance right is a big challenge because if the usability is poor, people will not use the service which defeats everything.
Are there any recent disruptive innovations that have had an impact on your business?
Sean Keevey
The biggest disruptive innovation for us is the Civil Service Renewal Plan and the Public Service ICT Strategy. We have taken the ‘digital first’ approach very seriously and since 2014 have made all available online, except a number of small schemes. This has led to a huge increase in online uptake by our customers and also in the level of service that we can deliver.
Shared-services is an important part of the mix and we are involved in sharing services both as a consumer and also a provider. We avail of PeoplePoint and the OGP [Office of Government Procurement] as a shared-service and we provide desktop and network services a number of organisations such as the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment and the Department of the Taoiseach. We also host the Civil Service wide Payroll Shared Service.
Aeneas Leane
Analytics has been a big innovation for An Garda Síochána, with crime analysis services supporting policing operations. We have a lot of data and it’s about making sense of that data. There are in the region of one million crime incidents recorded each year. Analysing that data helps best allocate resources and to put in place policing plans to disrupt criminal activity. We have also recently introduced an eVetting service where vetting applications are processed online which has reduced waiting times for the public and the number of in-house resources we need in this area.
Mark Lande
Cloud, with 60 per cent of our applications now in the cloud. We are now questioning the need for on-campus data centres. It may be that in three to five years we do not have any on-campus infrastructure with everything in the cloud.
John Burke
Cloud is also big for us. More and more of our activity is better fulfilled by something that is fulfilled in the cloud. How data is secured is a key focus and how to deal with the pace of change in cloud services. Cloud is transforming the whole technology industry.
Gary Tierney
Mobile in itself has been disruptive. The traditional IT department in any organisation has been dealing with a workforce that arrives and leaves at certain times and there is a chunk of work in between, with predictable applications and processes. That has been transformed with mobile and cloud services and there is now an expectation that everything should be available 24/7. In this new world you need to build systems that are consumption based and that are designed to scale up at certain times to meet customer demand. Everything is also interlinked – mobility, security, cloud services, data analytics – and technology has become embedded into everything we do.
Sean Keevey
In agriculture, sensor technology is starting to grow in importance. Smart agriculture is using this sensor technology to measure things like milk production and grass growth and then communicating that data centrally. It is a rapidly growing area that will transform the way agriculture operates. The Department in 2015 launched a new SHARP [Sustainable Health Agri-Food Research Plan] which has a whole section dedicated to data, ICT and sensors.
In terms of IT investment, do you think Product as a Service would benefit your organisation?
Mark Lande
In recent years the public sector has faced the dual challenge of trying to invest in difficult times, against a backdrop of a booming IT industry in Dublin, which has made it a challenge to keep staff. Cloud solutions have helped address both these challenges and have offered new solutions. We will also need new skills in procuring cloud services. We do have these skills in different guises but there is a new emphasis and focus. There is a major upskilling exercise needed across the whole public service.
Aeneas Leane
For a number of years, it was about cutting back and that hasn’t always been about budgets. It has forced us to look at things differently and be more innovative in how we do things. The next phase for An Garda Síochána is to address some of the deficiencies we have had in terms of manpower, vehicles and ICT. Any business case needs to be aligned with where the organisation sees itself in five years time. As a policing service we are going to be more community based and ICT has a very important role to play in that in terms of supporting officers on the ground.
Sean Keevey
Products as Service has now become another model for obtaining ICT related services, for example in the areas of print services and desktop. We plan to increase our capacity in areas like vendor contract management, project management and enterprise architecture so we can, among other things, consume these services effectively. We are open to Product as a Service as long as it offers value for money, is secure and gives us the level of service we require.
Gary Tierney
There is a shift towards a hybrid environment, away from traditional environments with firewalls. It makes sense services should become digital and then the decision is to either deliver it yourself or consume the service from someone else – that democratises the cost but you need a good SLA [service level agreement]. In this environment, expenditure is moving from capex to opex. Ideally services should be available in a utility type environment, where you only pay for them when they are used. HP offers ‘Product as a Service’. It combines devices, lifecycle support, and expertise into a managed solution with cost certainty. It allows customers to manage multi-vendor PC environments. The industry is changing and the trend of product as a service gives the power to the people.
John Burke
Infrastructure as a service is now about engaging with the right partner and opens up opportunities once the infrastructure service is in place. Your partner should help you exploit that service to the full and also manage and control the spend that is required to access the latest services.
Sean Keevey
A critical aspect for us in the public sector is that we hold citizens’ information in trust. We are open to product as a service and cloud services but that has to be addressed and ensure the citizens’ information is totally secure.
Aeneas Leane
I agree with that. The Government Cloud Strategy needs to be developed and that will be our path into the cloud. Data classification will be a key element to achieve that.
In today’s digital age, is augmented reality or blended reality something that you use in your business or could see your organisation use in the future?
Gary Tierney
I believe in a future of blended reality created by the fusion of the physical and digital worlds. Sprout by HP is our first iteration of that, transforming your desk into a digital/physical workspace. The new opportunities that it opens up across so many industries from design, to education, to healthcare are staggering.
Perhaps the best way to explain augmented reality is to look at the future of healthcare, with a MRI scan result being presented in the form of a hologram and the consultant interacting with the data during a discussion with the patient. It is some way off but we are in an early phase of 3D. It started in the gaming environment and we are now seeing applications in healthcare and other industries. HP is investing in this area with our labs looking at different devices – a simple example is opening the screen on a notebook to turn it into a video conferencing centre. In time, 3D printing will change many manufacturing supply chains. Innovation is at the heart of everything we do at HP and reimagining how we’ll live, far into the future.
Aeneas Leane
It is easy to see possibilities in the emergency services field. With such a mobile workforce the less you have to interact with a machine the better and there may well be a role of wearable technologies to provide information to emergency workers in real time.
Mark Lande
In the learning environment there are a lot of practical uses of that type of approach, in terms of experiential learning. The traditional approach was to go out and do something in a physical workplace environment. There are now examples of augmented reality being used to train doctors and nurses. We have been training pilots this way for the past 10 years in flight simulators.
At UCD we are also looking to use augmented reality in the area of culture and heritage to allow people to experience our cultural heritage – which is akin to living history.
What one thing should senior managers focus on when introducing mobile technology?
John Burke
Security, particularly in the area of user identification. I think biometrics is the way to go to improve authentication.
Sean Keevey
The security issue around mobile technology is what I will be talking to my Secretary General about. This is the major concern for senior management. The technology will evolve but the security issues around how we use it are very important.
Gary Tierney
The pace of change is getting faster and the level of security threats are greatly increasing. Security, manageability and performance are three essential pillars of business technology. This Autumn HP launches the new X3 device it delivers mobile security, remote management and the power of a PC in your pocket.
Aeneas Leane
For senior managers: how can we do things differently? We tend to be comfortable with existing processes but mobility can change things significantly. We need to be open to changing processes and use the technology to do things differently.
Mark Lande
How might mobility change the nature of universities in the future? The fundamental question is will it be a physical campus that students go to and experience or will it be a learning environment? It could be your mobile phone. Some students want the social aspect of university but there is a significant cohort that just want the learning experience and are very transactional.
Gary Tierney
We are on the cusp of a generational shift, with a generation that has been brought up with 100 per cent digital lives and expect things in a certain way. They will enter the workforce and they are going to drive change and at a pace that we probably can’t even visualise today. At HP we are continually innovating new products to power the next technology revolution.
John Burke
John Burke is Manager, Enterprise Package Solutions, WIPRO Ireland and is responsible for the management, delivery and support of a portfolio of enterprise applications to a large financial services organisation in Ireland. John has managed the selection, deployment and implementation of a variety of applications, packages and solutions including a document management solution for around 12,000 users in an organisation with a focus on digital leadership.
Sean Keevey
Sean Keevey is the CIO in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. He has 27 years of ICT experience and currently his main areas of concern are a new ICT strategy, and customer service delivery. Sean is also a member of the OGCIO Council.
Mark Lande
Mark Lande is Chief Applications Officer in UCD and is responsible for enterprise applications within the university and the delivery of online services to students and staff. Prior to UCD, Mark worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM as an IT consultant for 15 years specialising in the development of IT strategies and the implementation of systems.
Aeneas Leane
Aeneas Leane is Head of IT Planning, An Garda Síochána and has responsibility for ICT strategy, information systems and the ICT Programme Management Office. The role encompasses the development of ICT Strategy, the support and enhancement of all enterprise systems and programme management across ICT. He has over 25 years’ ICT experience with An Garda Síochána and previously in the Department of Enterprise along with prior experience in administrative roles in the civil service.
Gary Tierney
Gary Tierney was appointed Managing Director of HP Ireland Limited on 1 August 2015 and is also UK&I Printing Business Director leading the HP print business across UK and Ireland, since 2013. Gary joined HP in 1988 and has vast experience across all of HP’s key business units, and consequently has an in depth knowledge of the Irish IT Industry. Gary was born and educated in Dublin and is married with three children.
