Cabinet Office Innovation Launch Pad Submission
Extract from the Cabinet Office Innovation Launch Pad web site...
"On 11 February 2011, David Cameron and Francis Maude announced a broad package of reforms designed to significantly open-up the public sector marketplace to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Included in the package was the concept of Product Surgeries – opportunities for SMEs to “pitch” innovative products and services to Government. Through the Innovation Launch Pad the Cabinet Office is now inviting SMEs to pitch their business proposals for products and services they can provide to drive better value for money for Government. Using this site, SMEs can submit their business ideas between Monday 28th March and Friday 22nd April. The best ideas will be handpicked by a community of civil servants and, after intensive mentoring from a team including Hermann Hauser, Mike Lynch and Jon Moulton, these suppliers will be invited to present their ideas at a Product Surgery in the summer. Downing Street will also host a reception for those with the best ideas. This will stimulate new, open competitions in Government markets in which these suppliers will be able to participate."
CommuniG8's submission to the web site... (link)
| Use inexpensive smart phones and an Open Source based infrastructure to records the outcomes of visits made by government and local authority representatives. Reducing costs and paperwork. | ||
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Organisations of all types have the need to send their representatives to visit their customers, clients, suppliers, partners or contacts and to record the outcomes of these visits in a way that my be easily retrieved. The information collected in this way provides valuable input to visit panning/optimisation and allows management to be aware of the state of these visits, as they occur, providing information that can be fed to other parts of the organisation such as call centres. While this type of approach to monitoring visits is already in use in a number of orgaisations, particularly the home delivery and logistics sectors, the infrastructure used in terms of hand-held devices, communications and back-end systems/databases is complex and expensive. By simplifying the information collected, using smart phones and Open Source software, these costs can be substantially reduced. “Visit Watcher” provides a service that allows organisations to record the outcome of any visit made to customers, clients, contacts via the Visit Watcher web site using an application for inexpensive Windows Mobile Phones. The Visit Watcher web site and Visit Watcher for Mobile (the application for the Windows Mobile Phones) communicate using SMS messaging. The use of which provides a number of advantages. Updates to planned Visit schedules can be sent out at any time. In areas of poor signal coverage, messages can remain queued and automatically sent in good signal areas. Visit Watcher for Mobile can still be used to record information in poor signal areas. Operational costs can easily be related to numbers of visits made as this directly relates to the number of SMS messages used. The system can be used in geographical areas where Mobile web access or mobile data plans are unavailable but SMS messages are. Simple and hence inexpensive devices can be used as the system has been designed to work with Windows Mobile 5 and above. The Visit-Watch web site utilises Open Source technologies such as the Linux Operating System, Apache Web Server, MySQL Database, Joomla! Framework and the PHP programming Language. The web site and the Windows Mobile application referred to above, have been solely developed by CommuniG8 Limited. |