Local council reduces communication costs with text

Link: Case study: Reduced mobile comms costs at St Edmundsbury Borough Council :: PublicTechnology.net :: e-Government & public sector IT news + job vacancies:

Found this article whilst trawling around the web. It’s quite lengthy, and does concentrate a lot on voice communications – however near the end of the article there’s a couple of paragraphs that talk about text.

Using SMS text messaging, teams in units such as refuse collection and landscaping now communicate with one another to divide work according to location and availability. For example, if one team of refuse collectors does not have capacity to remove all of the rubbish from a given site, they send a text message to another team requesting assistance.

As Mr Brindle says, ‘Many of our services have really improved as a result of greater collaboration between our mobile workers. Using SMS has not only increased efficiency but it is also a very quick and cost-effective form of communication.”

There doesn’t appear to be an application involved as such, just mobile to mobile text. Still, it’s good to see that the public sector is finally realising the power of SMS.