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Department
of Agriculture Uses Tablet PCs to Increase Efficiency
By
Byron Brewer
Ky.
Deparment of Agriculture
Field
personnel in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture's Division
of Pesticide Regulation soon will feel closer to their Frankfort
home office as a device the size of a child's Etch-a-Sketch bridges
the distance while increasing job efficiency.
Division of Information Technology (IT) staff will begin in late
fall to train pesticide field employees in the use of state-of-the-art
pentop computer units - or tablet PCs - that should cut out the
middle man in reporting and recording licensing and inspection
information.
Tablet
PCs will soon be a part of the daily working equipment of selected
Pesticide Regulation employees. The mobile unit will replace the
dozens and dozens of paper forms now carried by employees with
electronic versions.
"The Division of Pesticide Regulation licenses companies
and individuals for the sale, distribution, storage and application
of pesticides. For a worker in the field, that requires writing
down a lot of information as well as the re-recording of data,"
said Chuck Lee, IT division director. "These tablet PCs will
help KDA save money and eliminate many hours in duplicated work,
and I think they will make field staff feel more closely connected
to their home office." More than half of the Department of
Agriculture's staff work outside of Frankfort.
No longer will complex documents need to be retyped once they
are passed from field staff to Pesticide Regulation's Frankfort
office, said Alan Hamilton, an IT staff member. Up-to-date license
and inspection information would be at the field employee's fingertips.
Field personnel with the tablet PCs will be able to record handwritten
signatures and may also attach photos and other documents to their
transmissions, he said.
"The Department of Agriculture operates in the new century.
This tablet PC innovation for field personnel will help them to
become an active part of that automated world," said Ira
Linville, executive director of KDA's Office of Environmental
Services which oversees the operation of Pesticide Regulation.
"I welcome the change because it will make the Department
even more responsive to the needs of the citizens of the Commonwealth."
Today's innovations began in 1998 when KDA received funds through
the EMPOWER Kentucky information technology initiative with a
goal of streamlining routine field operations. Having witnessed
first-hand the duplicated effort of data recording in several
divisions, Agriculture Commissioner Billy Ray Smith and his IT
staff started investigating the possibility of equipping field
personnel with on-site computers in order to make work and data
relay more time- and cost-efficient.
Internal databases needed to be upgraded to allow for an unlimited
supply of users as well as potential for future growth. At the
time, divisions with many field staff members each had separate
databases that did not share information. That had to change.
"It was decided that the Department would begin with the
Division of Regulation and Inspection," said Lee, who has
joined KDA since the project's beginning and is spearheading its
continuance. "The search then began for the right software;
in the case of Regulation and Inspection, it was the software
system called WinWam (Windows Weights and Measures) that was tailor-made
for data retrieval operations. Then the hunt began for the right
hardware."
About 30 models later, KDA settled on the pentop unit from Fujitsu.
The unit allowed Regulation and Inspection field personnel to
carry with them information from the home office and to record
data that they later transmitted via e-mail to Frankfort. "I
believe the benefits of those early tablet PCs were probably realized
just as soon as KDA started getting the electronic reports,"
Lee said.
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