News

Lost in Africa

This month we preview a forthcoming mobile data conference, look again at tracking and locating staff and assets and especially the concerns of staff, and we show how tracking and voice over IP technology, developed for business, is now indirectly benefiting small communities in Tanzania, and ponder on what that teaches us about adaptability and innovation.

Firstly to Tanzania – where tracking technology developed in UK for lone workers and Voice over IP technologies have been applied indirectly, and then directly, to the good of small communities. As well as having a feel-good factor, this story shows what is possible by bringing together existing technologies both for fund raising and then for linking communities. In this case the focus was a charity, but perhaps, with a little out-of-the-box thinking, can spark ideas for your business too.

About three months ago the MCUG offices received an unsolicited phone call from Sean Murphy, a charity worker for Childreach International, He works both in the UK for the hospice movement, and also for Childreach initiatives directly supporting small communities in Tanzania. Sean had an idea – he wanted to fund-raise in the UK focussing on staff from big business, and giving them challenging event participation (good for team building and developing self confidence and planning skills) in return for donations for Childreach. The idea was to create a win-win for the businesses and the staff with much of the profits going directly to Africa, and with the added benefit of direct feedback to the donors from the recipients. So, why is this story taking up space in Service Management you ask? Well, the character building fund raiser was built round an outward-bound style orienteering-hunt in an area of about ten square miles of mixed urban and forested countryside. Sean needed to be able to severely challenge his participating teams whilst making sure they could be rescued if things went pear-shaped. Did I have any ideas, and as he’d planned the event for the first of December, and wanted to minimise costs so as to send most of the profits to Africa, how could this be done in no time, and for no money. (And we have all heard those same words before from our Board when proposing new IT projects, haven’t we?) To cut a long story short, we equipped each of the ten teams with basic GSM mobile phones from Nokia and Vodafone, and linked them in with Trackaphone’s live cellular location system. Martin Worth of Trackaphone supported the organisers, opening demonstration accounts for the event complete with the facility to message the phones from the control room map screens to help direct the teams scouring the frozen countryside for clues and checkpoints. The loan of a local business’s board room, complete with free coffee, and fast Internet access to the Trackaphone mapping server, computers, and a VGA projector created an instant and very professional control room complete with text communications to the teams, a moving wall map, the teams as icons walking, or running, over the wooded terrain towards base camp. Sean was happy, commenting that ‘none of the event participants were ever lost to the control room, even if they were often ‘lost’ to themselves!’ The outcome after 12 hours, and once participants teams were warmed up, was a good event and the entries bringing the hoped for surplus funds for the cause. Sean is confident that he now has a template for many more similar events – coming to a forest near you! Sean commented that ‘the rapid deployment of tracking technology was remarkably simple and very effective, it made administration and safety for the whole event practicable, and with the modest costs of off-the-shelf GSM technology I was able to maximise the surplus funds available to the work in Africa’. So, that was that, except that we were then thrown another technical challenge. Sean’s charity collected the money, and set about distributing it directly in Tanzania as planned. Returning from there he next wanted to get the school, which was the main beneficiary of this pilot event, to link up with a school local to the donor businesses here in the UK, and bring the donors, the press, and the community close to those they were helping. Cue another phone call to the MCUG offices. This time the question Sean posed was ‘I’ve a tiny budget, and I want a twenty minute audio conference tomorrow between thirty people in a school in Durham and a similar number of youngsters in a school in a little remote village in Tanzania’ . After a brief moment of disbelief we had a minor breakthrough. The teacher in Africa, her name is Upendu, had a basic pay as you go mobile phone, with little if any credit, and there was electricity in school for a few hours a day from a generator. The School had a weak mobile signal available from a distant cellular operator – but a signal nonetheless! Upendu could not afford to pay for international calls on her mobile, so here was where the Internet came to the rescue. The Durham end of the link was a PC, microphone and speakers hooked to the school broadband. Skype (out) routed the Voice over IP based call to Dar-es-Salem and thence in to the Tanzanian Telco who routed the call to Upendu’s phone. As all this could be paid for from the UK but in US Dollars (with Sean’s credit card) so Upendu had no direct costs, and those that were incurred were from our end, and pre-paid in the stronger currencies. At 2.30pm UK time pupils gathered in a school in Durham, and another similar group gathered in a small rural school near the Equator, all round a mobile, held high, and set to speakerphone. Ill leave the summing up of the event to Sean’s comments at the time. “The whole thing went like clockwork, with Upendu helping translate, we sang songs, asked questions, and let the children join in for a full twenty minutes. At the end we just ran out of questions, oh yes, and the other amazing thing was that in UK terms the whole session cost less that five pounds, and cost Upendu nothing in Africa except a flat battery, and a stiff arm from holding the phone up. I was impressed that the sound was pretty clear – even the songs. The power of today’s technology is amazing if it is just put together in the right way. The closer links this gives will forge a better understanding of how we can help the third world, and how they can help us too.”

In addition to being an interesting and heart warming story, it raises the issue of how much technology is already available, and how quickly and economically it can be deployed in a business setting as well as in the charity setting. Sometimes it’s just a case of thinking outside the box. Tracking, and mobile or fixed voice over IP work, and are remarkably suited to rapid deployment, don’t expect centimetre accuracy from the basic tracking services or HiFi quality from a compressed internet phone call to somewhere in the back of beyond, but these technologies are today all up and ready for use, and most importantly, get the job done.

Tracking willing, if wet, participants in a fund-raising game is all very well, but what about tracking your staff? There are two recent moves in GPS technology that are worth mentioning; first is the common availability of GPS chips with a much greater sensitivity. The use of GPS in some buildings, in wooded areas, or urban canyons is increasing. Less satellites and weaker signals in these places do not help accuracy, but nonetheless it is now possible to get a good fix in places that two years ago were impossible without a special receiver and antenna. Second, these chips are finding their way in to devices as common as the PDA and Blackberry. Several location-service companies offer enhanced tracking where the cell position and the GPS position are combined to give a fast response, and very flexible coverage. The paranoid may soon have their worst fears realised, with no place to hide - not even the broom cupboard! As ever, the most successful implementations follow the code of practice, and managers use location data sparingly, and not as a first line punitive tool.

Conferences tend to follow an annual cycle, a bit like farming, but without any of the mud. Returning to bloom shortly is Mobility Week, It tends to attract quite a few MCUG members, and uses a very interactive format where speakers speak to script for barely ten minutes, and then develop a dialogue with the delegates on the topic. With speakers from companies like RWE Power, Click, Eneco, Scottish Water, BT, MCUG and more promises interest and a good chance to get questions answered in an environment more like a multi stream workshop than a classic conference. The MCUG web site links to the event and tells MCUG members how to get a discount.