Briefing as a whole

DCS Mike Glanville of Dorset Police talks about that force’s innovative system for briefing officers and staff with crucial intelligence

One of the major challenges facing all police forces today is the development of systems that are able to effectively brief officers and staff with intelligence which is both timely and relevant.

Here in Dorset we have developed an electronic briefing and tasking system known as iTask, which aims to do just that. The system is the brainchild of Temporary Detective Inspector Paul Gibson who has been responsible for designing and implementing iTask and is the Project Lead in Dorset.

The aim was to deliver and facilitate highly professional briefings to officers and police staff across the county and is specifically tailored to individual roles and/or geographic locations. It also allows access to key aspects of intelligence and other key information which will assist officers and police staff in their day to day tasks.

iTask is a web-based product which runs off the force intranet and has been designed in-house. Essentially, the system is a central point of reference for briefing and tasking across the force area and can be applied at all levels, from safer neighbourhood teams through to force tasking and Level 2 activity.

The development of the iTask system first began in 2005 when the force recognised some of the problems with traditional briefing methods, which tended to focus on individual supervisors with little time to prepare and only very limited access to relevant information. Typically, frontline supervisors relied heavily on local intelligence units providing them with briefing material.

This approach led to an inconsistent approach across the force and it failed to maximise the valuable information which was being held within our systems. This situation is not uncommon – one of the major problems now facing all forces is the sheer quantity and complexity of information which is effectively ‘locked in’ to a wide range of separate databases. Retrieval of relevant information for briefing purposes then becomes the first major obstacle to effective tasking.

In addition, the approach to briefing at that time failed to take into account officers and police staff operating away from the main centres of policing. In particular, members of staff operating in the rural locations very rarely received formal briefings and very often relied on their own resources to research relevant information and/or intelligence.

Also, police officers and police staff in a wide range of supporting and specialist roles very rarely received formal intelligence briefings themselves and would have had very little access to briefing material in other areas of the force. This invariably leads to a ‘disconnect’ and a lack of integration between parts of the force that should be supporting and collaborating with each other.

One of the main aims of the project in Dorset was to provide a system which could effectively brief and task all of our staff regardless of their role or function. It was crucial that information was made available to people which was timely, relevant and specific to their role.

As well as making information available for briefing purposes it was essential that officers and police staff had the ability to easily access key information when they needed it and to make that process as intuitive as possible. Whilst there is still a need for the delivery of traditional team briefings in many parts of the force there was also a requirement to develop a process of ‘self-briefing’ which could cater for a diverse workforce carrying out a range of different functions and roles.

From a very early stage we involved officers and police staff in the development work and spent a significant amount of time and effort trying to understand what individuals and teams required and then designed the system around their needs as well as the needs of the organisation.

It was very clear that our staff was very