BlackBerry cost savings at Bedfordshire and Thames Valley

5 November 2009 by Rod McLaren

In early October 2009, RIM organised a round table event with Tory MP David Davies, Bedfordshire Constabulary, Thames Valley Police and NPIA.

Bedfordshire’s case study records time-in-station dropping from 46% to 36% for 1,100 officers, and Thames Valley reports time saved equivalent to 100 extra officers on the street – both stats indicate a significant cost-saving.

NPIA’s Gary Cairns said “When Airwave [the police radio network] expires in 2015, we are looking at whether we can have just one device”, and RIM’s PR will be happy that some media interpreted that as all UK police officers will be handed BlackBerrys.

Davies (this one, not that one) is a Special with the BTP and sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee, and offered an indication of Tory thinking on mobile data:

“There will almost certainly be cuts on public spending and so if forces can make a business case that a particular device can save money in the long term then it would have a very good chance of being taken up but we can’t just spend money left right and centre on technologies – it won’t happen. From my own experience I have seen the benefits of mobile data and it is something I would want to support if we there is to be a change of government.”

It won’t happen – the need for public sector IT programmes to measurably deliver both cost-efficiencies as well as capability enhancements.

(The background: The Cabinet Office has handed NPIA £80m since 2008 to achieve an additional 30,000 mobile devices in officer hands by 2010, taking total mobile devices in use to near 45,000. Some sources suggest that there are around 39,000 devices in UK policing, “with an even split between forces that have chosen BlackBerrys and those that have plumped for other mobile data devices such as Windows Mobile phones”, though I’m sure RIM would dispute that “even split” because they were reporting 20,000 devices over a year ago.)

Disclosure: Mobbu has stakes in this: we develop software for vendors in the UK policing market, including Airwave. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.

Support as a metric for technical debt in scrum sprints Airwave's £39m Olympics deal