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Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a great QA/tester

15 January 2009 by Rod McLaren

Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector.

We plan, design and build mobile/backend systems for customers like Airwave and G4S. We also create and sell our own mobile software products for the same sector, the first of which is now successfully rolling out at UK police forces.

Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design and development knowledge, and your skills as a QA/tester.

About the role

We’re looking for a talented, motivated software QA/tester who will take responsibility for the quality of our software products and projects.

The role is based in our new office in the heart of Brighton’s mobile community. We want to hire for it as soon as possible.

In this role you will be required to support the development team working as QA on a variety of internet and mobile application development projects developed in .Net/ASP.NET (web) and .Net Compact Framework/Blackberry (mobile) technologies.

We want you to be involved up-front with internal and customer product owners. Defining and documenting requirements (user stories) and writing test cases from business requirements. You will need to be involved with our development team, ensuring that what is released is of sufficient quality and passes critical regression testing.

About You

You are smart, you can get things done, and you can communicate. You’re great at finding those critical edge cases in systems, at breaking those systems, and you’re even better at explaining why they need fixing. You keep the developers sharp, and you’re all about attention to detail.

You understand acceptance, integration and performance testing, and will have good ideas about how to improve our testing methods and those of our customers. You keep up with new work in your field and participate in communities of practice online and elsewhere. You’re comfortable being customer-facing and will sometimes run acceptance testing on a customer’s premises.

Experience of mobile application testing, automated functional testing, load or performance testing and testing an agile (Scrum) environment will be useful.

You are a UK resident and passport holder: we’re going to have to get you security-cleared for some of our work.

Mobbu and technology

Our technology choices are pragmatic – we develop using the technology set appropriate for the product and the customer’s environment. In our past projects someone in your role might need to:

We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed by talented, well-organised developers. The successful candidate will be a very important member of the Mobbu team, responsible for the technical and architectural leadership of the MFO product.

If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.

(PS: If you’re not a tester… we’re looking for a Java developer too!)


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27 police forces get £30m phase two mobile funding from NPIA

5 January 2009 by Rod McLaren

NPIA’s 30 Dec 2008 press release (and news coverage since) indicates that the £30 million “will build on the existing investment to provide a total of 30,000 handheld computers by March 2010” (see the numbers, below).

“The following 25 forces were successful in their bid for a portion of this money: Avon and Somerset Constabulary, City of London Police, Cleveland Police, Cumbria Constabulary, Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, Dorset Police, Durham Constabulary, Dyfed-Powys Police, Gloucestershire Constabulary, Greater Manchester Police, Gwent Police, Hampshire Constabulary, Merseyside Police, Norfolk Constabulary, Northumbria Police, North Wales Police, South Wales Police, South Yorkshire Police, Suffolk Constabulary, Surrey Police, Sussex Police, Warwickshire Police, West Mercia Constabulary, West Midlands Police and Wiltshire Constabulary. The two agencies who have received funding are ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).”

Back in June 2008, NPIA announced phase one of the same programme, in which 27 police forces got £50m for 10,000 mobile devices – that funding was directed to both force-planned projects and “green-field” projects that used NPIA’s accelerator programme, which has two vendors, Airwave and C&W/Beat.

NPIA’s intention is that “all forces across England, Scotland and Wales will be given a portion of funding to roll-out the mobile information programme” – every “geographic” force has now received some funding, though some non-geographic forces and agencies haven’t received funding (see below). No forces have been funded twice yet.

See our previous post for commentary on the effectiveness and value of the programme and responses to media criticisms around cost per device, device security.

The numbers

Where police forces have disclosed numbers publicly there’s a citation, and we’ll update this post if we find more details; otherwise it merely says “funded” based on the NPIA release above. (Police force sources: UK Police Service and Wikipedia.)

ACPO London Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
City of London Police 0 funded
Metropolitan Police Service funded 0

ACPO Eastern Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Bedfordshire Police funded 0
Cambridgeshire Constabulary funded 0
Essex Police funded 0
Hertfordshire Constabulary £1.9m to add 1,000 PDAs and 300 MDTs 0
Norfolk Constabulary 0 funded
Suffolk Constabulary 0 funded

ACPO South East Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Hampshire Constabulary 0 funded
Kent Police £1.9m for 1,100 PDAs and 150 mdts 0
Surrey Police 0 funded
Sussex Police 0 £456k
Thames Valley Police £637k for 1,100 BlackBerrys 0

ACPO South West Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Avon & Somerset Constabulary 0 funded
Devon & Cornwall Constabulary 0 funded
Dorset Police 0 funded
Gloucestershire Constabulary 0 funded
Wiltshire Constabulary 0 funded

ACPO East Midlands Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Derbyshire Constabulary All five forces funded as East Midlands collaboration: £8.3m for 4,000 devices, training, infrastructure and other costs – BlackBerrys, PDAs and Mobile Data Terminals (MDTs) in cars; of which Northants police to get 700 BlackBerrys 0
Leicestershire Constabulary 0
Lincolnshire Police 0
Northamptonshire Police 0
Nottinghamshire Police 0

ACPO West Midlands Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Staffordshire Police £3.7m for 1,200 mobiles, ‘and 300 working with the Central Motorway Police Group [MDTs?] and the region’s counter-terrorism unit’ 0
Warwickshire Police 0 funded
West Mercia Constabulary 0 funded
West Midlands Police 0 funded

ACPO North East Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Cleveland Police 0 £830k
Durham Constabulary 0 £840k
Humberside Police £1.5m funded with NYP and WYP as Yorkshire collaboration 0
North Yorkshire Police Yorkshire collaboration 0
West Yorkshire Police Yorkshire collaboration 0
Northumbria Police 0 funded
South Yorkshire Police none £1m+

ACPO North West Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Cheshire Constabulary funded 0
Cumbria Constabulary 0 funded
Greater Manchester Police 0 £815k for 1,500 devices
Merseyside Police 0 funded
Lancashire Constabulary £3.36m for 2,200 devices 0
Police Service of Northern Ireland PSNI is separately funded?

ACPO Wales Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Dyfed Powys Police 0 funded
Gwent Police 0 funded
North Wales Police 0 funded
South Wales Police 0 funded

ACPO Scotland Region:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Central Scotland Police All eight forces were funded centrally through ACPOS: £2.5m 0
Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary 0
Fife Constabulary 0
Grampian Police 0
Lothian and Borders Police 0
Northern Constabulary 0
Strathclyde Police 0
Tayside Police 0

Special Police forces:

police force phase 1 phase 2
British Transport Police almost £2m to fund 800 PDAs and printers 0
Civil Nuclear Constabulary No NPIA-managed funding to date
Ministry of Defence Police No NPIA-managed funding to date
Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency No NPIA-managed funding to date

Other UK Non Geographic forces, and other agencies:

police force phase 1 phase 2
Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) 0 funded
ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) 0 funded
UK Border Agency No NPIA-managed funding to date
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) No NPIA-managed funding to date
Ports Police groups No NPIA-managed funding to date
Various others… No NPIA-managed funding to date

.

Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave, one of the large vendors of software and telco services to policing. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.


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Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a BlackBerry/.Net developer in Brighton

22 December 2008 by Rod McLaren

Update: we have successfully hired for this role now.

Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector.

We plan, design and build mobile/backend systems for customers like Airwave and G4S. We also create and sell our own mobile software products for the same sector, the first of which is now successfully rolling out at UK police forces.

Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design knowledge, and your skills as a developer.

About the job

We’re looking for a pragmatic and flexible software developer who will take technical leadership of our MFO product – it’s a BlackBerry J2ME mobile client and an ASP.Net/AJAX web/backend system. The developer will work with product owners and designers to maintain and improve the resilience and functionality of both the product suite and the underlying technology framework. It may also involve helping build and lead a small team of developers and test engineers.

The role is based in our new office shared with Ribot Design in the heart of Brighton’s mobile community. We want to hire for this role in early 2009.

About You

You are smart, you get things done, and you can communicate well.

You understand that perfect is not as important as robust and stable. You can coherently discuss the finer points of JAVA/ASP.Net, API programming, HTTP, XML/Schema, Web services, AJAX… You keep up with new work in your field and participate in communities of practice online and elsewhere.

You’re a UK resident and passport holder: we’re going to have to get you security-cleared for some of our work.

Mobbu and technology

Our technology choices are pragmatic – we develop using the technology set appropriate for the product and the customer’s environment. In our past projects someone in your role might need to:

We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed by talented, well-organised developers. The successful candidate will be a very important member of the Mobbu team, responsible for the technical and architectural leadership of the MFO product.

If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.

(PS: We’re also looking for a QA/tester.)


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Police Authority funds in Icelandic banks

10 October 2008 by Rod McLaren

100+ local authorities and other organisations have up to £1 billion invested with Icelandic banks, and rather than directly offering guarantees against potential losses, the UK government is currently pursuing Iceland. (Interestingly, in what was an expedient but inflammatory move, the UK used anti-terrorism legislation to freeze Icelandic assets in the UK.)

The APA reports that there are 15 Police Authorities in England and Wales that have £95.7 million cash invested with Icelandic banks. These are the forces:

The APA represents police authorities in England and Wales only. However, an Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland spokesman says that none of Scotland’s eight forces had investments in the collapsed banks, and there’s no news yet whether the Police Service of Northern Ireland has any money at risk.

Where the Police Authorities are commenting on it, they’re saying that they have invested according to the rules, and that there will be little immediate impact upon front-line policing. However, if the funds aren’t recovered there may be reduced capital expenditure in the next couple of years, and potentially an increased reliance upon central government funding programmes for modernisation, mobile and IT projects, such as those currently administered by NPIA.


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Always keep older versions of your Java apps on BES

24 September 2008 by Alex Laurie

Here’s a service management problem we’ve seen with customers recently. When updating to new versions of Java applications on your BES the natural tendency for an administrator may be to delete the old apps from the \program files\common files\research in motion\shared\applications folder – it’s a good house-keeping principle.

But if you’re administrating a large deployment of BlackBerrys, our advice is don’t.

Why? Because it prevents BES from remotely managing and removing the application, and in larger scale BlackBerry deployments you can’t guarantee that all the devices will be on and in a position to update at the moment that you (or your administrator) push out an application update.

If you delete older versions of your application from the applications folder (the .alx and .cod files), your BES server will no longer be able to remove that application remotely.

In that scenario, a user comes back from annual leave two weeks after the application update, turns on their device, and if BES can no longer delete the old version, they could see both versions of the application on their device. At best that’ll confuse the user, at worst it could lead to application conflicts.

So the simple service management rule is always leave old apps on the BES server, and instead change their disposition to disallowed in the relevant software configurations.

Disallowed applications in BES Manager
Click image to see it larger.

That way, your users’ devices will update properly as and when they switch their device on.


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Application updates not recognised on new BlackBerry devices?

24 September 2008 by Alex Laurie

One potential issue for BES administrators – especially at the moment with the BlackBerry Bold 9000 recently out on the market – is that the BES server may not recognise the device. This is a problem that most often occurs when you’re trying to do tasks such as push Java applications down to a new device.

Symptom: applications aren’t arriving on devices

You’re looking at BES Manager and it says that everything is ok:
“IT policy status: applied successfully… configuration status: OK… application status: up to date”.

BES Manager claiming all is good
Click the image to see larger.

However when you look at the BlackBerry, your application simply isn’t arriving and installing on it. BES Manager isn’t really giving you much useful information to work with. Fortunately there are some quick tests and fixes you can do.

Diagnosis

Firstly, you should confirm that your application is capable of running on the specific device by building it in the latest BlackBerry JDE and running it in the simulator. This will prove your app is correctly built for the target devices (your developer should have already done this).

Secondly, check the policy logs in the \Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Logs for today – you should search the text file for the pin number of the device you are struggling with.

Fix 1 for unsupported device or vendor ID

Here’s how to fix it:

  1. Download the latest Device XML and Vendor XML files from RIM (it’s good practice to make sure your device and vendor XML files are updated regularly.)
  2. In the directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\AppLoader back up the old versions of these files then put the new ones in there.
  3. And for a belts-and-braces approach it would also be worth restarting the BES services in the correct order.

Fix 2 for “install required”

When your device’s software configuration says “install required” but your application isn’t getting to the device…

  1. Try changing the speed at which new apps get deployed. Normally it takes up to 4 hours for an application to deploy on a device but you can speed it up if you follow the instructions on this page. (For development purposes we tend to set this at 5 minutes so we can add and remove applications quickly for testing, but we would not advise this in a production environment.)
  2. And remember to always restart the BlackBerry Policy Service after making changes.

(This note is a rewrite of RIM’s article KB13589.)


_Do you have any BES Admin tips or questions? Comment below._

NPIA funding, Airwave invests in Kelvin Connect, BlackBerry's 20k devices

22 September 2008 by Rod McLaren

NPIA, Airwave, BlackBerry, Kelvin Connect logos Evolution of police communications (4 Sep 2008) is the most accurate recent story on the state of mobile data in UK policing as it relates to government funding, NPIA, Airwave etc. It has some useful numbers on ROI. I would have liked to seen a clearer explanation of the inter-relationship of device, telco vendor and application (perhaps that’s something we should have a go at).

Notably, NPIA clearly envisages a signification consolidation in mobile policing in future – of device, of bearer, of technical approach etc. And they’re serving notice of their aim to be a central best-practice/best-product clearing-house, potentially mandating policy. It’s a pitch that didn’t work in their previous guise as PITO, but may be achievable now if they’re able to control funding criteria and conditions more tightly. NPIA CIO Richard Earland:

“Suppliers are still selling 43 times into 43 forces, rather than engaging us in a more strategic debate. The work we are doing in terms of national consolidation will lead to fewer solutions, more consolidation, more cost-effectiveness and that will produce some challenges for suppliers as well.

“I accept there is a degree of diversity and that is right at this stage of development of the product in an operational context. Over time we will see consolidation because there is an expressed intent to consolidate and converge the police IT landscape to 2015.”

News is expected soon on the awards of the second tranche of £25m funding for a further 15,000 devices by 2010, which was announced in July 2008.

BlackBerry’s position in mobile data isn’t discussed at all in the article, probably because it looks built on interviews with NPIA (which tends to de-emphasise BlackBerry) and Airwave. However, RIM has recently PR-ed its own device numbers in UK policing: ‘approximately 20,000 devices’ at 28 police forces, and growing. RIM also notes that it is getting a slice of the NPIA funding action at forces like Thames Valley which has 1,100 BlackBerrys. It’s pretty impressive growth.

But one area where RIM isn’t getting any NPIA spend is from the Accelerator Programme, which is designed to fast-track police forces who aren’t yet doing much with mobile data. The winning suppliers to the programme are Cable & Wireless/Beat, and Airwave. Neither C&W nor Airwave have yet made significant announcements on which forces are undertaking Accelerator Programme projects, but Airwave have recently announced a £1m investment in Scottish mobile data software applications house, Kelvin Connect:

The investment builds on an existing relationship between the two companies – Kelvin Connect already partners solely with Airwave to deliver its system through the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) Accelerator Package. This offers Airwave police customers by far the most comprehensive and effective data-capture, processing and reporting solution.

Erm, I’m duty-bound to clarify here that the “Kelvin Connect already partners solely” refers to an exclusivity on Kelvin Connect’s side: if your police wants to use accelerator programme funding for their excellent software products, then you have to go to Airwave, whose offerings also include products built by three other software development partners, Siemens, Arrk, and us. Beat has the same exclusivity with C&W, and that both telcos are talking up their partnerships is indicative that there’s a lot of value in the applications themselves.

In law enforcement, the [Kelvin Connect] system enables police officers to make notes, complete statements and complete forms covering every one of their processes. This removes the burden of paper work for front line officers and streamlines or removes back-office processes, returning officers to front-line policing for at least an extra hour per shift.

That one-hour-saved-per-shift is becoming a common ROI mantra in mobile policing. Perhaps we’ll see vendors differentiate themselves with larger quantitative numbers in 2009, or an increasing focus on qualitative measures of success.

Related posts:

.

Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.


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NPIA's mobile data accelerator programme

4 July 2008 by Rod McLaren

The other day we wrote about the Cabinet Office’s plan to fund 10,000 mobile devices via NPIA, and that post listed the police forces whose individual applications were successful.

However, the £50m also funds NPIA’s “accelerator programme” for mobile data, which is designed for police forces who haven’t yet undertaken significant mobile data pilots yet. There’s no press release on the NPIA site yet but details on the accelerator programme are starting to emerge. [Update, 22 Sep 2008: the press release was New investment for police hand-held computers, 22 July.]

NPIA selected two vendors, Airwave and the Cable and Wireless—Beat consortium. Police forces will invite either or both to tender for their accelerator programme requirements, and take a package of applications, devices and so on from the single, winning vendor. (However a comment in the Computing story hints otherwise: “Forces will still be able to procure independent systems should they wish, though the Airwave and Cable & Wireless deals are likely to be cheaper and faster to implement.”

Airwave are pushing their Tetra bearer of course. Their press release mentions that Lancashire Constabulary and Lincolnshire Police will both be taking Airwave mobile data solutions. They have a long article on the Bapco journal about their offering, which includes on the application side:

There’s not much detail yet on the C&W offering, though the Beat Systems client application toolkit and mobile gateway are likely to be at the core of it.

The obvious question is whether an accelerator programme can genuinely accelerate mobile data use in a police force. The answer is found in how well and flexibly a product suite can engage with organisations with complexity and processes. The Home Office and NPIA have certainly set challenging target dates.

Vendor winners and losers

So the winners in accelerator programme were Airwave and C&W/Beat and the losers are presumably BlackBerry and the other Windows Mobile-based vendors (though some of these, such as HCL, Detica etc, are already having significant successes in policing).

But that’s merely a single funding programme for mobile policing in the UK, albeit an important one. We expect the future picture for mobile data for police to remain heterogenous in both device and vendor. No single vendor will dominate (no doubt, an aim of NPIA’s), but Airwave and BlackBerry will be the leading platform vendors, and on the frontline application side Beat Systems and others like Detica, HCL, Kelvin Connect [Update, 22 Sep 2008: who have since taken a £1m investment from Airwave] and Airpoint will do well. (And unsurprisingly, we expect vendors selling specialist applications to do well!)

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Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.


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27 Police forces get £50m for 10,000 mobile devices

27 June 2008 by Rod McLaren

Source image from the excellent Police Oracle website, though the maps at APA and Open Scotland are more useful NPIA’s press release, 25 May 2008: 27 police forces will receive a total of 10,000 handheld computers to help them increase police officer time on the beat. And as reported by the BBC: Police given hand-held computers and the Telegraph: Government is to spend £50 million equipping police forces with hand-held computers to ‘cut paperwork’, despite frontline officers saying they are ineffective.

Successful police forces

Tony McNulty, Minister for Policing, said,

‘We are investing in new technology to make crime fighting more effective and to save officers’ time. This £50 million capital fund will deliver 10,000 mobile data devices to forces. It is just one element of a range of improvements we are delivering to cut unnecessary bureaucracy, exploit new technologies and enable police officers to spend more time on front line policing.’

Police forces which made successful bids were:

But Durham Constabulary had its application rejected by the Government and Northumbria Police did not apply for the funding. (All of those details are from news stories – we’ll update if we find more publicly.)

Commentary and criticism

The project has had a fair amount of commentary and criticism though.

Does it cost too much per device?
The headline criticism is that £50 million divided by 10,000 devices is £5,000 per device, which is a hell of a lot more than devices actually cost on the street. The story behind these numbers is that the funding is for both one-off set-up costs (the devices, infrastructure, training, procurement costs, etc) plus the operational costs for a multiple-year period (data plans, data management, management overheads, etc). Whilst there’s no doubt that government needs to spend wisely, this isn’t quite as simple a story as it might have seemed of government massively overpaying.

Are the devices secure?
Or ‘what are the risks when the devices get lost or stolen?’ This is typically answered in three ways in mobile data. Firstly, strong user authentication security, which is generally a policy/training matter for IT groups to manage. Secondly, robust remote data and device management allows devices to be wiped of data or rendered completely unusable in the event that a device is lost or compromised. BlackBerry lead in this area. Thirdly, applications only store data locally temporarily, or have their access constrained to information that isn’t protectively marked or Restricted, rather than Confidential. Airwave’s services are good at this latter approach.

NPIA’s recent comment on security briefly mentions all three approaches:

The NPIA has taken a technology-agnostic approach to which networks the devices will run on, prompting some concern from security experts. Some forces will use Airwave ­- the police radio network ­- while others will opt to use commercial networks. The NPIA said that because traffic is encrypted, the network used is irrelevant.

RIM wouldn’t entirely agree that the network is solely where the security concern is. In a news story with Thames Valley Police (in which he also notes that 10% of police officers carry BlackBerrys now), Graham Baker reminds us that BlackBerrys are the only mobile devices to be accredited for use with up to ‘restricted’ level data by CESG.

Is mobile data genuinely effective, reducing paperwork or saving time?
The Government is to spend £50 million equipping police forces with hand-held computers to ‘cut paperwork’, despite frontline officers saying they are ineffective, says the Telegraph. There are two things here. Firstly, there are studies that claim the opposite. The first to hand is the 2007 North Wales Police case study in which a Niche RMS on BlackBerry solution gave an average 58mins increased time out of station and reduced “dead” time per shift for uniformed constable and PCSOs), and projected 1.475m in financial efficiencies for 2007-8 and 2008-9.

But note that uniformed officers and management might not agree on success criteria for a new technology project. A lack of dead time might not always be perceived as a measurable improvement. And that leads to the second point: that it’s perhaps a story of capability expansion rather than time saved: more is done in same time.

There are caveats to this though. Some pilots run alongside existing systems and processes, resulting in officers having to enter data into two, parallel, unconnected systems. It’s not a great way to run a pilot because it proves that the technology works, but not that policing teams are happy to use it (too often it can harden officer resolve against the new system because it, rather than existing systems, appears to represent needless work).

Shouldn’t we spend the money on more frontline officers instead?
(Or as a Kettering resident commented: ‘I don’t think Blackberries are the solution. They need to get more officers and get them on the street.’) The Flanagan report publicly notes that after several years of growth (police officer numbers have grown, particularly in the areas of neighbourhood policing, Community Support) police budgets are now under a lot of pressure, and may fall in real terms. Because of this, the focus will shift towards increasing capability and efficiency of officers, the (sad) truth being that technology is usually cheaper than bodies. The challenge for design and technology vendors is to play their part in making products that enhance police officer capability without distancing them from the communities they serve.

Future funding?

NPIA haven’t yet announced the funding, vendor choices or procurement conditions of their “accelerator programme” for mobile data, but an announcement is expected soon. (The accelerator programme is for police forces who haven’t undertaken significant mobile data pilots yet, and comprises a chunk of the £50m fund.)

Update: NPIA announced in July 2008 that the Accelerator vendors are Airwave and C&W/Beat.

And beyond that, NPIA also hints of more funding to come in future. NPIA’s CIO Richard Earland:

‘We have heard from the minister that there will be a second wave of funding, and it’s very likely that forces will provide some of their own resource, and I’d expect to see most operational staff having these devices at some point in the medium term.’

Update: NPIA’s announcement of £30m additional awarded funding came in December 2008.

This will be dependent upon the success of the first wave of funding: can it deliver positive and sustainable business outcomes? It probably can, though the key challenge in achieving that is probably the aggressive timescale set by the funding.

.

Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave, one of the large vendors of software and telco services to policing. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.


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Security at London 2012 Olympics

19 June 2008 by Rod McLaren

It has been months since we posted – very poor form, but there is material on new products and projects coming soon. In the meantime…

We’re going to be watching security with interest in the run-up to the Olympics in four years. David Ross (Carphone co-founder) was recently appointed by Boris Johnson to review progress on the 2012 Olympics. His first report, 18 June (pdf), has this on security:

The security plans are at a very early stage and significantly behind the rest of the planning. It is absolutely vital that significant progress is made quickly on security planning so that necessary facilities are identified early enough to be provided cost effectively. As was seen with Wembley, there will be significant cost implications if security considerations have to be built in to the Olympic facilities/logistics at a late stage. It is also difficult to have confidence in current cost estimates in the absence of a full, costed security plan. Failure to catch up and complete this work satisfactorily will have serious implications for Londoners as they will be the people most exposed to disruption and security risks. I recommend you should ensure you have regular direct reporting on progress from those responsible for delivery in this critical area of the project.

And Boris responds: “it is vital for us to catch up if we are not to have cost increases and disruption and I will be discussing this urgently with ministers and with the Commissioner.”

Which should add pressure on the many other policing organisations (and a few private security firms) involved to deliver well on security.

But perhaps the Met Police wouldn’t agree with Ross’s assessment of preparedness. Torch lessons for 2012 Olympic security (BBC, Apr 2008) gives a pretty good public overview of the current security programme:

As head of the Olympic security directorate, [Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur] has a staff of 7,000 and will oversee a £600m security operation covering 60 days around the games.”

For comparison, in 2006 The Guardian reported that the security budget was initially drafted at £220m.

[...] ‘We are installing a technological footprint across London as our first line of security. We cannot police the games without an extensive level of technology. This will be our first level of policing.’

Technology footprint is going to mean extensive cctv coverage, smart ticketing, plus automatic id-recognition for people and vehicles.

[...] ‘The second line of security is police officers and private security firms. The third level is command and control, to deal swiftly with any incidents. We will move in quickly and shut any incidents down – a swift reaction is imperative.’

Interoperation between police forces and private security firms will be an interesting and difficult challenge – mixed sets of technology are common across police forces (often within individual police forces), let alone between the public and private sectors. We’re going to try do our bit in our projects by being friendly to other systems, data formats and APIs.

Disclosure: Mobbu develops applications and products in the security and policing sector.


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