The mobility miracle

Mobility solutions are transforming the way enterprises deliver services, while also improving their bottom lines.

The rapid uptake of mobile devices by consumers and workers is leading to a revolution in the way public and private sector organisations deliver services to both their staff and customers. Here we present three examples of how mobility solutions are delivering outstanding results in three very different sectors, beginning with health care.

Mater Health Services comprises several hospitals, health centres, a world-class medical research institute, and pathology and pharmacy businesses, all with one aim — to provide exceptional care.

The organisation has been implementing a conversion from traditional desktop PCs to virtual desktops, using Citrix technology, while at the same time upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7.

“The value for us is around session portability,” said Steven Parrish, CIO and executive director of information and infrastructure. “In health care, whenever a doctor or a nurse tries to log on to a computer, in a traditional Windows environment it can take up to five minutes for the computer to boot up, for Windows to load and then for them to get into an application. When they’re going from patient to patient in a very short period of time, they can’t afford to be waiting five minutes in each room for the computer to log on. With Citrix we’ve been able to get that down to less than 10 seconds.”

These are not trivial time savings. The Citrix solution can save an hour or more per day, per clinician.

“Before I came into IT I was a nurse for 10 years, so I understand how health care works,” said Parrish. “If you talk to any clinician about technology, they say it has to be quick, it has to be simple and it has to give you the right information at the right time so you can make the right decisions.”

In the Cancer Care Centre, chemotherapy patients are housed in ‘pods’ while receiving treatment. With the Citrix system, clinicians “can go from pod to pod very quickly, open up the applications in one pod, [then] go to the next pod, log on, all the applications come with them and they can access all the information,” said Parrish.

“We’re rolling out virtual desktops further in the organisation, as part of our upgrade [from XP] to Windows 7,” he adds. “We hope to have about 80% of our desktops replaced by virtual desktops by Christmas 2015.”

And having gone the VDI route has given Mater Health Services a dramatic boost in manageability during the upgrade process. In one instance “we had about 1000 Windows XP VDI sessions, and we allocated one person to upgrade them all to Windows 7”, said Parrish. “It took him about a month. How long would it take you to do that with physical desktops? And he did it all from his desk.”

The marvel of mobility

The City of Charles Sturt is a metropolitan council located in the western suburbs of Adelaide, serving about 110,000 residents. The council employs approximately 470 FTE workers, with around 170 of them being field workers equipped with about 130 mobile devices. Field teams include road workers, mowing, rapid response, cleaning, barbecue and beach teams. It has $1 billion-plus of assets under management.

To keep track of everything, the council uses asset management and mobility enterprise solutions from TechnologyOne, which has enabled it to transform cumbersome paper-based processes into a slick, efficient electronic and mobile system.

Previously, for instance, if a member of the public called to report a pothole, it would take four or five days for the report to make its way to the maintenance team. Now it’s as little as 15 minutes.

“The field worker on their mobile device receives the exact location and potentially photos if the member of the community has attached any,” said Jodie Rugless, the council’s information services manager. And from there the field workers are linked into all of the asset data around the pothole itself, such as the configuration of the asphalt, what the roadbase is and so on.

It has “very rapidly become the heartbeat of our organisation”, said Rugless.

The council has continued to expand and adapt the system, such as turning paper-based operations manuals into electronic versions held on mobile devices. “It sounds like such a minor thing, but we’ve got about 150 different pieces of plant in the field, so previously there was a folder kept in every single one of them that had about 600 pieces of paper in it,” said Rugless. “And every time one of those got updated, someone had responsibility for printing out the new one, carting it out to the truck, placing it in the folder and getting rid of the old one.

“The big turnaround for us has predominantly been around redirecting people to the points of the business that make a difference, as opposed to spending time shuffling pieces of paper,” said Rugless. “And our field workers who used to spend a lot of time in the office getting their pieces of paper are now out doing these services on a daily basis. It’s made a huge difference.

“I think what excites me most about it is that [the field workers have] taken charge of it — they own the system, it’s 100% theirs,” said Rugless. She cites the example of the council’s arborists using the asset and mobility system to fine-tune their tree pruning program, which used to take seven years to cover the entire council area. By making better use of asset data and carefully planning their pruning schedule, they’ve reduced it to two and a half years.

“That’s where I go, ‘That’s bloody unreal!’” said Rugless.

Learning on the go

Still in Adelaide, and the University of Adelaide has rolled out Citrix’s XenApp system to remotely connect its tens of thousands of students to myriad centrally managed software applications running on virtual machines in the university’s data centre.

“You’re running your applications at the back end in a virtual server environment, and it is effectively screen-scraping — you’re sending the output of a screen to the client and you’re taking the input from the client back,” said Mark Gregory, the university’s CIO. “But all the action’s really occurring in the data centre.

“There’s been a great deal of work to make things translate smoothly, so if you happen to be on a tablet, your finger touches now work as you would expect if the software were running locally. The connection to the server in the background is very seamless.”

And it doesn’t matter which kind of operating system the user has. “To give you a sense of scale, right now we’ve got 13,500 Windows users, 7000 Android users, 17,000 iOS users, 5000 Mac users and 2000 other [devices],” said Gregory. “Any of those people can use any one of 140 different pieces of software that we’ve got available on the system. We call it project ADAPT — any device, any place, any time.

“It really leverages our resources, so rather than us running around updating software all the time, we can deliver our software this way,” added Gregory. “We’re actually spending less time to deliver to more people in a way that they would prefer, so it’s an all-around win-win.”

There are a lot of advantages to managing software centrally, such as the security benefit of containerising data. “So if you’ve got a device and you use the Citrix environment to work with important data, it doesn’t actually stay on your device. As soon as you close the app it’s no longer available,” said Gregory.

And the system is efficient, too. “We built for initially up to 400 concurrent users, and we thought we would have to build for more and more concurrent users. But what we found was that most people use this tool very sparingly — they go in, they do something and they leave. Unlike when you’re sitting at a desktop, most mobile users are in and out of an application,” said Gregory. “And as a result, we found that our concurrency didn’t need to be that high, and we could still be serving 15,000 students with only 400 or 500 concurrent.

“The university is very pleased and it’s very convenient for students,” he added. “I worked with this technology back in the 1990s, from the same company, Citrix, and wasn’t terribly impressed, [but] its really come a long way.

“What I would say to IT professionals is, if you haven’t looked at it lately, it’s really worth a look again,” said Gregory. “I was a little bit sceptical when someone on my team said they wanted to try delivering this way, but now that I’ve seen the results, I’m definitely more impressed with where the technology’s at.”

Image courtesy NEC Corporation of America under CC