Delivering the data-sharing solution

Mat Hanrahan looks at the various components required to support the sharing of data and intelligence at a local, regional and national level.

The role Information Communications Technology (ICT) has played within UK law enforcement has always focused as much on tracking performance and demonstrating accountability to established procedure as it has on addressing crime. Over the last five years, however, a combination of rapid advances in technology and the growing need for police forces to co-ordinate resources has put ICT in the front line of police reform.

In 2001, PA Consulting’s Diary of a Police Officer report estimated that officers were spending up to half their shift completing paperwork in the station, and that much of this involved unnecessary duplication of effort. Three years later at the beginning of this summer, the Bichard Inquiry exposed the fact that many British police forces still rely on fax and telephone as the primary methods of sharing information with each other.

Given the threat of international terrorism and the mobility of the modern criminal, the need for the Home Office, local police forces and law enforcement agencies to pool their resources into a national ICT infrastructure capable of addressing such shortcomings could hardly be more urgent. The reconvening of the Bichard Inquiry in January 2005 and a rapidly approaching general election is likely to add some momentum to the cause, but according to the Chancellor’s spending review and the Gershon report of July, the public sector should look to commercial enterprise to see how ICT can be used to improve efficiency – and save taxpayers money.

Up until the early 80s, an enterprise that was serious about achieving competitive advantage tended to invest in mainframes whose working parts were welded together with custom-made code. The solution usually came from one supplier, who was consequently in a good position to name the terms and price of support.

As printed circuit boards brought new types of cheap and powerful computers onto the market, companies tried to side-step this kind of ‘lock-in’ by investing in mini-computers and PCs. These systems lacked the manageability of centralised mainframes, but were attractively priced, and a commercial market for ways of building sophisticated data-sharing systems out of low cost components quickly established itself.

Today vendors of both software and hardware have designed their products to be built in a modular way. ‘Component software’ breaks down traditional application functions into self-contained pieces of logic that can be re-ordered and interpreted by multiple systems, regardless of language or platform. Programmers can assemble libraries of software to be used and re-used when needed, a bit like a Lego set, rather than be forced to invest in slabs of custom-made code dedicated to each task.

On the hardware side, similar principles are used within ‘virtual management’ systems that can conjure high-performance super-computers out of clusters of low cost servers. The key benefit here is that, rather than having to make a rough estimate and paying for it up front, a system administrator could add capacity and power when it was needed.

These kinds of component and ‘virtual management’ software provide the modern glue capable of connecting systems regardless of whether they are a handheld computer or a legacy mainframe. By breaking down each working system and the processes it supports into a series of small re-usable parts, it becomes possible to make the kind of incremental changes in systems that break the need to ‘rip and replace’ every five years, allowing for a smoother investment cycle.

PITO (Police Information Technology Organisation) has long recognised this kind of flexibility is essential to the long-term future of policing. The Information Services Strategy for the Police Service (ISS4PS), originally released in December 2001 and endorsed by the Home Office in 2003, was drawn up with the intention of establishing common standards that would cut the costs o