Week 400

26 October 2011 by Rod McLaren

[Mobbu summer party photo by Áine]

And in the blink of an eye, we turned 400 weeks old – a couple of weeks ago. This is roughly what we were doing.

Will and Tom are putting the finishing touches on a major upgrade to the software product that runs at our police and other customers. Their code has fixed some bugs, improves many small things, and adds a massive new area of functionality is both more specialised for current customers while also being ready for a broader set of future customers with different messaging needs. I’m deliberately being vague about these magic templates so I don’t puncture customer confidentiality, but you should understand that it is brilliant.

Now and then I have been helping them out by barking hex codes at Tom and Will so they can try yet another colour palette to see if it’s slightly better than the last one. It’s hard to get right because there are several dimensions to design for: various messages types, day- and night-time use, BlackBerrys and laptops, projections and wall-screens – and some of these do weird things to colours.

Tom eventually managed to make his phone upgrade to iOS5. Stace has just returned from juggling the important holiday tasks of getting children to playgroups and playing Starcraft 2, and is getting his teeth back into running development things. The coffee machine got a breather whilst he and Adam were away.

And Áine has been making sure that it’s ready to go by performing loads of exploratory QA and a vicious series of automated unit, Selenium and performance tests. After that’s done, we’ll get everyone together and do a few rounds of tests on the streets of Brighton. (Week 402: Áine’s Irish dancing team just won second in the nationals and will be going to the world championships next year!)

Deployment isn’t a simultaneous “push” performed the moment that testing is complete – for security reasons, most of our customers currently run their systems on-premises, and we need to plan a time when they’re not going to be using the system intensely and when we can perform regular system health checks. We usually do the larger deployments on site to keep it all running smoothly. So Emma is getting dates in calendars and being ready to re-plan as needed.

Last week Adam was on holiday – we’re now at the size where, on average, someone’s usually on holiday – and has just returned. He’s punching the BlackBerrys to make their Over The Air updates work to his exacting standards. Matt and Rob are building a new User Acceptance Testing platform for us; after that they’ll upgrade our Development platform. The software moves from Dev to Staging to UAT to our Production platforms, and finally out to customers.

They’ve also been doing something complex with encryption that we can’t talk about yet. They’ve tweaked our Nagios monitoring, which will peep at us as soon as any hardware or services flap. Similarly, on the device side, there are diagnostics to review and update and some warranty returns to handle. Matt and Rob also tell me that they’ve started playing Starcraft 2, apparently to win rapid promotion (and I’m immediately reminded of playing Age of Empires with the others at Football365 in 1998ish – thus the wheel of history turns: the graphics get better but the dried-out eyes and RTS claw-hand remains the same).

But much of that work was interrupted by a massive outage at BlackBerry – the Ops maestros been talking to RIM, our mobile carriers, our customers, and checking whether our test and support devices are working properly. Since the BlackBerry is the only mobile data platform CAPS-approved for to Restricted in the UK, it will have affected a lot of police forces and government organisations. It was a quite a pain, and an important reminder to us of the basics: minimise your single points of failure, and communicate bad news quickly and clearly.

Brad and Emma have been meeting the delivery teams at two large customers to work through several security and infrastructure projects over the next few months. There are multiple organisations involved, so they are juggling scope, budgets, timescales, procurement process and compliance needs. Emma and Jez have been travelling between customers on training, support and account management missions, and getting ready for the software release.

Mark and Alex have been perma-road-tripping around the country talking to the many people in UK policing that we hope to win as customers. We’ve been working on how to package the product so that it can be sold to smaller groups while delivering better return on investment for the customer – it’s very encouraging that there’s a lot of interest. Policing is experiencing seismic change at the moment – budgets are being cut, national bodies are being re-organised (NCA, NPIA, Soca all affected), so we need to stay on the move, keep talking to people.

I’ve been thrashing lots of spreadsheets and looking at budgets. Dawn is locking down a lot of accounting details and managing the building work at our new office. Tyra has just returned from maternity leave – it’s good to have her back. She, Dawn and I are working out how we’ll work together to cover accounting, purchase and sales ledger, HR, payroll, office admin and a few big projects. We’re considering running finance and admin as weekly scrum sprints.

And that’s a flavour of our week 400.

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Weeks 1-399 and 401+

In 2004, we formed the company around a single criminal justice project, which grew considerably, added a mobile dimension, and ran successfully for seven years. Since 2004 then we’ve got a lot done. We focused on mobile and security. We switched some years ago from an offshore development team to a UK-based one that’s orders of magnitude stronger. We’ve built and delivered several mobile/backend products for companies and police forces. We’ve developed our own product on BlackBerry and wrapped infrastructure and ops/support services around it. (Sometimes the consulting work comes back around. If you deliver well with a product that’s wrapped in a service, then customers might ask you to perform bespoke R&D projects for them for speed – we have a small number of these projects at the moment. They may also ask you to wrap your service around other third-party products.) We’ve grown that talented team.

We want Mobbu to provide the best real-time, security-accredited mobile software products and services to the security market. The aim is building something of national importance, something that matters to our customers and particularly the effectiveness and safety of their people, something that we can tell our (security-cleared, ha ha) grand-children about. There’s lots of work to do: building products, delivering support services, doing deals, growing the team, constantly improving.

Doing this is never easy, and we’re very fortunate to have a brilliant team of development, testing, ops, training, account management, sales and finance people, and without whose skill, effort and passion we’ll fail. It’s a privilege to work with Jez, Mark, Emma, Rob, Matt, Adam, Áine, Tom, Will, Stace, Tyra, Dawn, Brad and Alex on this.

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Is the BlackBerry Bold 9900 RIM's best device yet?

21 October 2011 by Brad Legge

Thanks to our friends at RIM as part of our Select Alliance membership, we get sent the latest pre-release BlackBerry’s to test our Police mobile applications on.

This is normally difficult for us because our Police applications can only run on CESG accredited device operating systems. Something that takes RIM 6-12 months to achieve. So testing on latest devices as soon as they are available is not a high priority for us.

Instead I have been using the BlackBerry Bold 9900 as my personal device and here are a few things I have observed:

Touchscreen and tactile keyboard
At first this seemed like a good feature – having the best of both worlds. It turns out if you (like me) are a big fan of the BlackBerry keyboard (and this is their best yet!) you will stop using the touchscreen in favour of the trackpad and keyboard. Touchscreen has become a redundant feature in my view!

That said the Police community will probably see past the redundant touchscreen in favour of the really good keyboard.

Battery life
Battery has been downsized (1500 mAh battery in Bold 9700 2 yrs ago and Bold 9900 has 1250 mAh battery) and I experience about 1 day’s use. If I have Bluetooth and and Wifi on then less than a day! Could be due to it being a demonstration unit and there is a lot of background logging etc RIM do on these demo devices. But I am not the only person who is feeling the pain.

This alone would make it a non-starter as a Police device!

Navigation panel
While I have to vouch for the great trackpad (lights up at night!) on the navigation panel. The navigation panel itself between touchscreen and keyboard can cause problems. Firstly it feels like it is part of the touchscreen and so feels like it should (but its not) be touch sensitive. Also single-handed use (something many BlackBerry users have always vouched for) of the touchpad can cause problems if you accidentally hit the touchscreen while trying to scroll on the trackpad.

This is something that I imagine would be an annoyance for Police with big thumbs and gloves!

Tech
Impressive and powerful processor and HD video camera/camera, which I have used extensively for filming the kids doing funny things. Which is where the 8GB on-board memory comes in handy. Still not sure what I am supposed to do with the NFC chip though!

Our police (surveillance) community would find the high res camera/video useful in the field. And because our customers are not allowed to store images on an SD card the 8GM on-board memory would be very useful.

Overall
I would start off by saying that if the battery life issues I have experienced are real then it is not a device we would suggest our Police customers consider. It is also their high end device in terms of price so that would also affect Police buying decisions.

On the other hand the device has a great look and feel and more importantly very high build quality. This together with the keyboard and technical specifications are the reason (and the waiting for the iPhone4S to be released ;-)) why I have stuck with it longer than intended.

I would go one step further and say that (battery life issues aside) it is probably the best device RIM have built. And the great keyboard really makes me nervous about moving to a touchscreen only device. That said I also feel touchscreen is a waste on a device with a tactile keyboard. it should be one or the other in terms of touchscreen and tactile keyboard. Which I guess means I now need to review the BlackBerry Torch!

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Mobbu bows out at 3m prisoner escort journeys as GEOAmey replaces G4S

23 September 2011 by Rod McLaren

I saw my first GEOAmey vehicle one afternoon last week, a freshly unwrapped white van that was probably returning some prisoners after their day at Brighton’s courts.

The Ministry of Justice awarded new contracts for prisoner escorting in England and Wales in March 2011, and as of late August GEOAmey are the newest entrant and largest player in that market – they’ll be managing approximately 2,600 daily prisoner movements.

Like the previous rounds of private-sector-delivered escorting, this round of PECS contracts in England and Wales is for seven years with options to extend for three. The contracts are to manage around 1,200 locations in England and Wales, including 760 police stations, 147 prisons, 420 Magistrates’ Courts, 112 Crown Courts, the Appeal Court, 13 Tribunals, and up to 222 County Courts – and around 955,000 prisoner movements annually between those locations. The MoJ expects the new contracts to save £250m (20%) over the initial 7-year period.

So how did the contracted vendors in prisoner escorting do?

There’s plenty of raw data for the 2011-18 contract but we’ll attempt a comparison of the last two contract periods by showing prisoner journeys and revenue rather than a direct geographic comparison because escort regions have changed between 2004 and 2011:

Contracted vendor	2004-111	2011-182
GEOAmey	n/a	3 regions: Southwest/Southeast, EMidlands/Yorkshire & Humberside/North East, and Northwest/West Midlands/Wales. 670,000 prisoner journeys and £90m/year, £572m total.
G4S	2 regions: North and East. 515,000 prisoner journeys/year”: and £65.6m/year, £459m total (and the inter-prisons contract, worth £80m over a shorter term).	none
Reliance	1 region: Southwest/Wales. Est 240,000 prisoner journeys/year3 and est £32.3m/year, £226m total4.	none
Serco	1 region (pdf): London/Southeast. 250,000 prisoner journeys/year and £48.3m/year, £338m total.	1 region: London/East. Est 285,0005 prisoner journeys/year and £42m/year, £280m total (partnering with Wincanton plc).
Total	1,005,000 prisoner journeys/year3 at £146.2m/year, £1,023m total4. £145/prisoner journey.	955,000 prisoner journeys/year at £122-138m/year6, £852.5m total. £128-138/prisoner journey.

Each region had four bidders, except the Northwest/West Midlands/Wales region which had three. The eight award criteria (IV.2.1) measured the bidders across the custodial, logistic and standards spectrum. GEOAmey are the obvious big winner, Serco held ground, while G4S and particularly Reliance lost out⁷. The cost per prisoner journey has dropped in real terms. Hopefully job losses were minimised – I’d guess most employees transferred to new employers under the TUPE legislation.

The contract’s underway. GEOAmey’s partners have delivered, and a few teething troubles were always to be expected.

Ave atque vale⁸

G4S were one of our first clients: in 2004, we built them a web system called PACS to do the custody management at courts. We then added a mobile system called PACS Mobile to track the journeys between prisons and courts on 350+ BlackBerrys. Since then the system has been used by 2,000 G4S vehicle, court, management and compliance staff to manage about 2,000 prisoner journeys daily at 170 courts and 19 vehicle bases across the UK.

But G4S’s transition from England to Scotland in August marks the end of an era for Mobbu: the new PECS contracts introduced new business needs (new geographic areas and inter-prison transfer, at-court efficiencies) and no doubt compliance requirements that the IT systems must meet. G4S’s Scottish contract will have different requirements. We’ve shifted focus to the police market, and GEOAmey are bringing their in-house systems to the contract. And the best of luck to them.

I’m sure it’s considered poor PR practice to draw attention to the loss of a customer, but we’re very proud that our system worked solidly and did its job well. It ran for seven years and handled about 3.1 million prisoner journeys. PACS Mobile is a beloved ancestor of our police product, MFO, but has reached the natural end of its life.

To PACS and PACS Mobile and the people at G4S and Mobbu who ran you, hail and farewell.

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Footnotes:

¹ Financial numbers are annual and for the eventual 7-year period – NOMS didn’t exercise its option to extend the contracts.

² Financial numbers are annual and for the initial 7-year period. With contract extensions, the totals would jump c 30%.

³ Estimated: 420,000 prisoner journeys annually less approx 180,000 from their Scottish contract = estimated 240,000 journeys

⁴ Estimated: 2011-18 contract is £852.5m, and an approx 20% saving on the previous 2004-11 contract. 2004-11 is therefore implied at approx £1023m. Subtract the GEOAmey revenue figures above = estimated £226m.

⁵ Estimated: 955,000 prisoner journeys annually less GEOAmey’s 670,000 = 285,000 prisoner journeys annually for Serco.

⁶ Estimated: £852.5m over seven years = £121.8m annually. But vendors own estimates sum to £132m annually, so we’ve put the range in.

⁷ G4S have made gains elsewhere: they won Scotland from Reliance – approx 180,000 prisoner journeys prisoner journeys annually, worth £24m/year – nb Scottish prisoner custody is contracted by the Scottish Government rather than the Ministry of Justice so I’ve excluded it from the table above.

⁸ atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē – and for eternity, brother, hail and farewell – as Catullus saluted his dead brother.

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National Crime Agency announcements, June 2011

20 June 2011 by Rod McLaren

Detail emerges on the National Crime Agency from the Home Office announcements, the NCA plan and commentary elsewhere.

The problem statement is summarised in paras 1.2, 1.3 and 2 of the NCA plan: “the national response to serious and organised crime remains patchy [...] absence of a cross-government organised crime strategy, the lack of strong national tasking and coordination, [...] tendency to operate in silos”, and the NCA aims to address that.

What will the NCA do?

The NCA will conduct (run) cross-agency operations:

the NCA will work with police and crime commissioners, chief constables, devolved administrations and others, genuinely connecting activity from the local to the international – in country, at the border and overseas

The head of the NCA will be a senior chief constable or, as the Telegraph puts it, the most senior police officer in Britain with powers to order other chief constables to undertake investigations. The NCA plan is a little more nuanced:

[From the NCA plan] 1.6 [...] The NCA will have the authority to undertake tasking and coordination of the police and other law enforcement agencies to ensure networks of organised criminals are disrupted and prevented from operating. The tasking and coordination function entails the NCA setting the overall operational agenda for tackling serious and organised criminality; ensuring that appropriate action is taken against criminals at the right level led by the right law enforcement agency; stepping in to directly task where there are disputes about the nature of approach or ownership; and where appropriate, tasking or providing its own resources in support.

It will develop a core intelligence, analysis and prioritisation capability, and will have four commands:

The agency will answer to the Home Secretary and will be made up of four distinct crime teams – Organised Crime, Border Policing, Economic Crime and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. It will employ investigators, enforcement officers, intelligence analysts and technical, financial and operational specialists.

So CEOP retains some autonomy as a command. SOCA and NPIA get absorbed and the government will legislate in 2012 to formally disband those organisations. Some of UK Border Agency role moves to the NCA. The Serious Fraud Office has been left outside of the NCA for now, co-ordination to happen in committee with NCA’s Economic Crime Command. Counter-terrorism remains outside NCA, with national asset dumps led by Met Police’s CTC. Para 1.5 of the NCA plan talks about “mirroring” the structure of CT policing – perhaps this is a hint that NCA will eventually encompass CT after 2013. RoCUs and other units that cover level 2 and 3 crime remain in their force-funded regional structures.

The Road to NCA

A shadow NCA, with an appointed Chief Constable and a crime coordination function, will be set up before April 2012, with full transition by the end of 2013 (see the Home Office Structural Reform Plan). From the NCA plan:

7.2 The NCA build will learn the lessons from other machinery of government changes. With the objectives of minimising disruption and securing the best value for money, the NCA will seek to use or adapt existing systems rather than designing new ones. Any procurement proposals for the NCA will be subject to very close scrutiny and challenge and will only proceed where they are clearly essential and unavoidable. The NCA will inherit a range of systems and assets from its precursor agencies, including the SOCA 2010 ICT renewal programme. [...]

7.7 The total cost of the organisation will not exceed the aggregate of the Spending Review settlement for the precursors and the costs of the fully funded functions it is agreed should migrate into the NCA. Transition and running costs will be kept to the absolute minimum necessary to enable the new agency to function; the transition programme will be managed with a rigorous focus on achieving best value.

“NCA will seek to use or adapt existing systems rather than designing new ones” is encouraging, and this procurement strategy should be good news for current vendors to SOCA, NPIA and crime policing functions, though some of the precursor organisations were somewhat budget-constrained.

Policy Exchange’s Blair Gibbs suggests that a national body with teeth and accountability is a natural corollary of the decentralisation of local policing when Crime Commissioners arrive, and concludes:

With a wider remit and more powers, the NCA should avoid the fate of its predecessor agency, but to succeed it will still need to attract high-calibre recruits, earn the respect of specialist officers in local forces, and avoid the competitive animosity that characterises the relationship between the FBI and local law enforcement in the United States. If the NCA can do that, then it will finally resolve the national/local paradox that has beset British policing for years and begin to make the lives of organized criminals a lot more unpleasant.

More:

• the National Crime Agency plan
• the debate in Parliament, 8 June 2011

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Police Fed and ACPO disagree as police cuts start to hurt

1 June 2011 by Rod McLaren

The budget cuts are starting to hurt, but the pain is now internal: this week we saw sharp words between the Police Federation, who are a union-like association for 140,000 rank and file police officers, and ACPO, who perform the same role for chief constables and other senior officers. The Police Federation are annoyed with Sir Hugh Orde’s non-attendance at their conference, believing it to be a symptom of a wider failure of ACPO to prevent/resist the cuts. They’ve written a critical open letter to ACPO, who are no doubt annoyed that the Pol Fed and so have offered a equally public rebuttal.

Paul McKeever and Ian Rennie, for the Police Federation (pdf file):

We currently have the ‘perfect storm’ in policing resulting from Winsor’s attack on pay and conditions, Neyroud’s proposals on promotion and leadership, and Lord Hutton’s proposals on pensions. Policing and Crime Commissioners will potentially change the political dynamics in the Service and there is a move to remove police officers from the protection of health and safety legislation. Police officers are rightly demoralised by this full-on attack on their pay and working conditions. Experienced officers are leaving, or being required to leave the service, in unprecedented numbers and those that remain will be shouldering an ever-increasing burden of public expectation as crime increases. [...]

Sir Hugh, the Police Federation is looking to ACPO to defend the UK Police Service. It is the envy of the world, but is in danger of being destroyed by what appears to be, in part, no more than political ideology. Our conference has sent a clear message that officers currently have no confidence in ACPO, as an organisation, acting in the best interests of British Policing. We urge you to work with us, challenge the government where necessary, and to modernise the Service but not at the expense of the Office of Constable and the communities they serve. The officers working throughout the Police Service in England and Wales are deserving of greater support from their leaders.

Orde for ACPO (pdf file), and signed by many of the ACPO top brass:

I can say with absolute certainty that every chief officer team is working tirelessly within their force, bearing in mind the very difficult financial situation we are presented with, to cut budgets while preserving the critical service we deliver to the public. The reality is that this is extremely challenging: and a number of forces have had to take drastic action to balance budgets. We must be entirely clear about this with our public, with government and with all those who work within the service. Each force is impacted in different ways and many chiefs have articulated this both in public and in private. Without question, the service overall will suffer and reduce. As chief officers our job is to lead policing through these difficult times, remaining focussed on keeping communities safe from harm. [...]

The Winsor, Neyroud and Hutton recommendations are all subject to consultation and we are determined that the outcomes of these processes should recognise and reward officers fairly for the difficult, dangerous and critical job that they do. I feel we can best do this by recognising our different roles but more importantly reinforcing our desire to serve our communities.

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Iraq Inquiry: "the Dossier was precisely to make a case for war"?

16 May 2011 by Rod McLaren

Friend of Mobbu Mick Laurie was in the papers on Friday because his evidence given last year to the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war has just been published.

Some of the coverage: Guardian (“His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government’s claims about the dossier”), Politics Home, Daily Mail (“crucially, Downing Street had made that clear at the time”), Independent, Telegraph, BBC.

From his letter to the inquiry in January 2010:

we knew at the time that the purpose of the Dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care. The question that needs to be asked is, if there had been no remit to draft the “Dossier”, would the JIC in their normal process have produced papers that would have come to the same assessment as the Dossier?

From the transcript of his evidence in June 2010:

[page 6] SIR MARTIN GILBERT: You told us in your submission that the February/March 2002 dossier—I think your words were, “was rejected because it did not make a strong enough case”. I really have two questions on that. First of all, given the evidence that was in the dossier, what case did you feel it did make and who was it who rejected it?

MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL LAURIE: Yes. I mean, I don’t know because I wasn’t conscious of the production of that. It was something that was being put together. What I do know is that people—I mean Joe French came back from some JIC meeting and said, you know, that dossier which was the four country dossier did not make a case for war and we are going to be doing this all again and we need to collect more information. So over the summer the pressure sort of built up and up to try to collect more.

SIR MARTIN GILBERT: So already in February/March there was this case for war?

MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL LAURIE: Yes, I mean we were quite clear on that. I’m not saying that was good or bad, it was just the fact: the purpose of this thing was to make a case for war.

There’s also some meaty stuff on pages 13-14, page 15 (“there is one implication in that: the suggestion that the real intelligence was better than in the dossier, when in fact it wasn’t quite as good as in the dossier”), and 18-19. And then:

[pages 20-21] SIR RODERIC LYNE: Perhaps I can just come back on one point on the dossier before we move on. The sentence in the foreword that Sir John alluded to, can I just read it to you and then ask you as an intelligence professional to say how you would characterise it? This is from the Prime Minister’s foreword: “What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.” Now, was that a justifiable encapsulation?

MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL LAURIE: No, because I don’t believe it was beyond doubt. [...]

SIR RODERIC LYNE: So “continuing production of chemical and biological, continuing efforts to develop nuclear”; now if you had been the chairman of the JIC and this had been shown to you in draft, would you have queried that sentence? [...]

MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL LAURIE: Yes, I mean one has to have courage and stand up and say “I can’t sign up to that”, yes.

And in concluding on pages 29-30 and 32 his view is that whilst there was no intelligence case, there was a strategic case for action in Iraq.

Alistair Campbell’s response on Friday:

To restate the contents of the tweet I sent yesterday – I was, and remain, absolutely clear about the purpose of the dossier at the time, which was not to make the case for war, but set out the reasons why the Prime Minister and the government were becoming more not less concerned about Iraq and WMD. Also, I was and remain clear that at no time did I or anyone in Downing Street put pressure on the Joint Intelligence Committee.

‘Witness says same thing as he has been saying for years’ may not be deemed newsworthy, but I can say to those journalists outside the house, and those calling and emailing, that it is all I am saying, other than to restate that I have never met Major General Laurie.

I’d guess the best account of the political-psychological background to the dossier is in Rawnsley’s The End of the Party.

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Lords push back on Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

13 May 2011 by Rod McLaren

The House of Lords has pushed back on the govt’s Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill by voting for a muscular Lib Dem-led amendment that effectively breaks the Bill. Lord Harris explains what happened in the vote:

The House of Lords has just voted by 188 to 176 – after more than three and a half hours of debate – to delete the first part of the first clause of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. The words deleted are: “There is to be a police and crime commissioner for each police area listed in Schedule 1 to the Police Act 1996 (police areas outside London).”

And this is from Lord Harris’s speech during the debate:

However, what distinguishes this proposal is that we are talking about the direct election of an individual who will be given tremendous responsibilities, but without a suitable governance structure to prevent a situation in which the individual might make capricious judgments or seek to trespass on the operational independence that chief constables hold so dear. The Bill would give an individual tremendous authority, but without the governance structures, checks and balances that would be necessary given the importance of the role.

(Now, the Home Office’s draft protocol outlines accountability mechanisms that should ensure operational independence – “The operational independence of the police service, and the decisions made by its operational leadership remain reserved to the Office of Chief Constable and that Office alone” it says on page 1. But the difficulty of maintaining that independence is perhaps illustrated by yesterday’s news that the Home Office appears to have asked the Met to review the Madeleine McCann case.)

No doubt the Bill will go back and forth a bit because the govt remains very keen to put elected commissioners in place.

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MoD Green Paper on Equipment, Support and Technology

8 April 2011 by Rod McLaren

This was our submission to the MoD Green Paper on Equipment, Support and Technology.

rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno (a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan) – Juvenal, 82 AD

...

The MoD’s Green Paper consultation event for Equipment, Support and Technology on 9th March 2011 was informative. A series of Ministers and Govt officials very clearly outlined the UK’s near future: an ‘unpredictable’ and tumultuous geo-political terrain. A street vendor’s self-immolation starts a ‘strategic shock’ of political dissent that spreads across the Middle East. (Two days after the consultation event, there will be an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan. We live in Blackswanistan.)

The speakers – and the Green Paper – were also clear on the required response: an rapid, adaptable, flexible, resilient capability across defence and security.

Of these qualities, speed seemed most important. Several speakers mentioned the iPhone apps, Twitter, Facebook as examples of the new rapidly-connected, asymmetric world, and as exemplars of rapidly-adapted flexible response to events. There was a sense of technology being both the un-nerving symptom of an unpredictable world and the hopeful prescription for it.

The immediate economic context is more predictable: do more/better with less because there is less to spend. Doing better with less means demonstrable efficiency savings, auditable value for money.

There’s a significant tension between wanting to minimise risk and cost and wanting to achieve speed and suppleness of response. Baroness Neville-Jones acknowledged that ‘we do appear to want to have our cake and eat it’.

Nonetheless, what’s needed is capabilities and systems that are fast, good, agile and cost-effective.

Mobbu builds and manages real-time communications systems to users in the field for UK police forces and MoD, so our comments are confined to our area of expertise in software and managed software services.

1. Achieve faster project deployment by keeping projects small and accepting larger risk

Procurement frameworks and project board processes are often very successful at managing projects to minimise the risk of project failure. This is often at the cost of delivery time and budget, and can result in inflexible solutions. However, the Green paper clearly identifies speed and flexibility as increasingly necessary characteristics of future security/defence capability.

Where projects don’t put lives at risk (and we realise that’s easy to say), there’s an argument for shouldering a larger risk of project failure risk in order to achieve vastly quicker deployment and delivery of value. Additionally, where a project can be kept smaller, the potential impact of any project failure is reduced.

Faster/smaller projects give stakeholders earlier visibility of project success (or failure), and provide the capability to iterate flexibly at low cost when new information is learned.

Shifting our position on the risk-speed spectrum is likely to be controversial. But it may be aligned with the economic realities (should, for instance, MoD’s procurement management capability be reduced in future). And in fact, there is additional risk to shoulder regardless: the risks of inflexibility or redundancy inherent to large and slow projects and methods increase as the environment becomes less predictable, or the risks of project failure inherent in faster/more flexible solutions.

Recommendations:

• accept the risks of project failure to achieve great speed and flexibility
• significantly streamline procurement process
• keep project size smaller to mitigate impacts of failure

2. Adjust commercial relationships and procurement approach with vendors so that interests are aligned

There’s a pressing need to work smarter in procurement to achieve genuine cost-savings alongside effective capability enhancement.

Too often procurement processes are adversarial, encourage over-large projects, project inflexibility and penalty clauses that in the long-run hurt both sides (eg MoD’s aircraft carrier contract). They also tend to encourage a winner-takes-all outcome from the vendor perspective, which discourages vendors from working together to achieve the aims of the policing/security/defence sector.

Traditional pricing models (eg large one-off fee, then a maintenance percentage, consulting charges for change requests/improvements) have tended to encourage vendors to avoid (or over-charge for) making changes to products and services in response to changing business needs. In short, inflexibility. Alternate pricing models (eg flat annual licence fees, relatively short contract term commitments, or leasing products) can encourage vendors to be more responsive to business needs and keep improving their products.

Following on from these points, working together – and earlier – appears to be an area that could be tackled in a way that fits in with the procurement rules while encouraging both customers and vendors to openly discuss the issues and potential solutions.

Recommendations:

• Lease or annually license solutions (rather than buy/maintain) to ensure an commercial relationship in which the vendor is incentivised to properly manage, support and continually improve the product or service. (Our own experience with UK policing/MoD is that an annual licence is an effective way to deliver a product that responds to changing business needs and improves over time.)
• Agreeing nationally which products and services deliver the required solution and buying them collaboratively – from a vendor’s perspective it is easier to put the best price forwards when the deployment is across higher numbers of forces/units.
• SMEs can often provide a better, more agile solution focused on the customer’s requirement, and more cost-effectively.
• Encourage vendors to work together to deliver successful outcomes.
• Using an independent industry body such as ADS and their Special Interest Groups – working parties of selected, security-cleared and open-minded vendors could work with focused groups from the community to discuss the problem space and where solutions are required. This not only helps the policing/security community interact with industry but will also encourage industry to work together as per our points on interoperability.
• Future-proofing: Investigate solutions that can be offered in multiple forms and multiple price points – eg same capability/solution that can be delivered an an install on customer premises or in future as a fully-hosted service

3. Vendors must support the security/defence sector being able to work together by delivering products that interoperate

The security/policing/defence sector has a clear operational need to increase interoperability between different forces, agencies, working groups, etc: operations increasingly cross geographic and agency boundaries. Technology needs to be in place that enables various different units work together collaboratively and also hand off to each other when the operational requirement deems it necessary.

However, too often interoperability doesn’t happen because:

• technology systems are unable to communicate/share data with each other (or it’s considered to be uneconomic/contractually impractical to achieve that)
• or vendors are commercially motivated to “silo” their products and services in the belief that it delivers them higher margins and customer lock-in

In some cases vendors are starting to work together to make sure that the products they sell to the security community are interoperable, but this is infrequent rather than the rule.

Mandating interoperability from vendors tends to be expensive in contractual terms if retro-fitted, and expensive in political/procurement terms if it requires many agencies to agree requirements up front in order to procure a single, large solution. (That said, buying the same, interoperable solution collectively is a useful tool for getting the best price and solution as the vendor is incentivised to work harder on your behalf.)

An alternate approach would:

• mandate that vendors make continual progress toward interoperability with products and services from fellow vendors and inside the public sector estate, inside the context of a commercial relationship (see 2 above) in which vendor(s) are strongly incentivised to improve services.
• suggest/mandate the use of agreed or open data standards and APIs to make interoperability more efficient

Such an approach would leave some leeway for varying local requirements or procurement/funding approaches.

Recommendations:

• Vendors must deliver interoperable products via APIs, open standards or other means.
• If vendors are already incentivised to deliver real business benefits, delivery of “working together” can be conducted at the product improvement level rather than at the more expensive procurement/contractual level.

4. Interoperability exposes varying local SOPs which could be harmonised

One unintended consequence of interoperable systems is that their use reveals variance in local Standard Operating Procedures that can hold back efforts to work well together. Having deployed a system that is nationally interoperable, Mobbu has encountered some subtle and some large variances in how different units work across policing/security.

The causes are generally varying interpretation of a national guideline or deliberate local preference. The risk is that even when using technically interoperable solutions, the variance of SOPs may create:

• operational confusion because different groups work or communicate differently
• an incomplete or confusing evidential trail

During critical operations such as threat to life or where other security/policing disciplines are involved the risk is even higher.

Recommendations:

• Recognise the unintended consequence – that interoperable systems can expose varying SOPs – and plan for it
• Discuss SOP patterns with vendors who via their support function may clearly see the range of variance

5. Share success criteria and stories

The security/policing/defence sector doesn’t consistently share their success criteria with industry, which makes it harder for vendors to see whether their product/service is an appropriate fit for the problem, and where they’re under-delivering or could improve.

Projects and services that have delivered well aren’t used consistently within the differing disciplines in policing/security/defence. A solution that works well in one discipline may also work well for the others, and increasingly as they interoperate, using the same kit in the same way will pay dividends.

Recommendations:

• Share success criteria and metrics before a project commences and after it is in operational use, so that both customers and vendors can clearly see areas that need performance improvement.
• Share success stories within security/policing, the wider public sector and industry, so that successful projects can be directly extended and built upon
• Identify and share strong approaches so that they can be copied and adopted elsewhere for the benefit of security/policing customer and the wider public sector.

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Disclosure: MoD is a customer.

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Reducing costs in policing

25 November 2010 by Rod McLaren

Two stories last week on reducing costs.

1. Changes to stop forms will save 800,000 hours

[Home Office press release:] New proposals laid in parliament today will save an estimated 800,000 hours of police time each year.

The first steps to scrap the stop and account form used by police – and save an estimated 450,000 hours of time each year – were taken today. In future, seven items will need to be recorded [on stop and search forms] rather than twelve. This will save around 350,000 hours of time each year.

In 2008-9 there were 2.2m stop and accounts and 1.5m stop and searches. If 350,000 hours saved by recording 5 fewer items in 1.5m stop and search forms, then frontline policing is spending about 3 minutes per recordable item on a stop and search form. This gives vendors selling forms software (eg Helimedia, Airwave) a very rough baseline metric to beat in order to show cost savings to forces.

2. Police forces using Airwave texting rather than radio to save money

Airwave’s excess charging for going over the contracted monthly radio minutes are high, so forces are encouraging officers to use Airwave’s SDM messaging (like text messages) as a cheaper alternative.

Officers in one rural force have been told that a penalty charge of up to £2 a second is imposed as soon as the number of calls they make goes over a pre-arranged limit.

According to Dorset Police Federation chairman Clive Chamberlain, the punitive levy has led to a series of cost-cutting measures [...] ‘It was imperative to have a secure communications system. But it has come at a very high price. The advice we’re being given from the top is to send texts as much as possible because it’s going to cost a lot less money.

‘There have been a series of briefings at which a senior officer has said it costs Dorset £2 a second whenever we go over the limit. We are being told that texting more has the potential to save tens of thousands of pounds because it costs only 4p to send 1,000 texts.’

Airwave’s comment is that “£2/second” doesn’t tell the whole story, and are presumably prevented contractually from explaining the mitigating details. Update: Airwave has rebutted the story’s details, stating that each [radio] transmission costs less than 1.5 (one and a half) pence – though that’s still expensive compared to some tariffs on commercial mobile networks.

As we’ve discussed before, Airwave isn’t the only mobile platform running across UK policing – BlackBerry are doing well and non-Airwave Windows Mobile have had a little success. The opportunity is for mobile platform/software vendors to displace Airwave text messaging with services that are richer, faster and cheaper because they run on off the shelf hardware (BlackBerry et al) on commercial networks (3G).

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Disclosure: Airwave are a customer; we also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.

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UK policing spending plan 2010-2015

21 October 2010 by Rod McLaren

The 20 October 2010 spending review announced cuts to the Home Office budget of 23% (6% annually) by 2015.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s comment: “I believe that by improving efficiency, driving out waste, and increasing productivity we can maintain a strong police service, a secure border and effective counter terrorism capabilities whilst delivering significant savings.”

The numbers:

• Central government police funding cut 20% by 2014-15 (4% annually)
• UK Border Agency funding to be reduced by up to 20%
• Home Office central administration budget cut by 33%
• Home Office capital budget (long-term assets such as buildings, IT) cut by 49%

Reductions will be achieved by:

• efficiency and productivity measures in the police ‘back office’, says the Home Office
• modernising police pay and conditions, and removing central bureaucracy and targets
• introducing directly-elected Police and Crime Commissioners
• folding the National Policing Improvement Agency into the new National Crime Agency (saving £50m+)
• reducing support and purchasing costs in the UK Border Agency, investing in newer technology, and making migrants and visitors to the UK meet an increasing proportion of the costs (saving c £500m)
• police forces can make procurement savings by acting together when buying goods and services

Olympic spending and counter-terrorism funding are semi-protected:

• The UK will retain its capabilities to tackle the terrorist threat and there will be sufficient funding to deliver a safe and secure Olympic Games in 2012.
• Counter-terrorism-specific policing will be protected will [with] a smaller percentage cut (10%?) than overall police funding.

Note that because 80%+ of police budgets are headcount, it’s hard to achieve cuts without reducing staff and frontline numbers. Osborne said that the aim was to maintain “visibility and availability” of officers on beat, but equally no guarantee on police numbers was offered.

Indeed, HMIC’s July 2010 report had warned that efficiency gains would take policing only so far: “A cut beyond 12% would almost certainly reduce police availability unless it were prioritised over and above everything else the police did” (Valuing the Police, July 2010, p4) and Greater Manchester Police’s Chief Constable Peter Fahy’s said there was “no question” the cuts would lead to fewer officers. KPMG predicts 18,000 police officers jobs will go, and the Police Federation 20,000.

There will certainly be significant budget pressure on IT, infrastructure and other service projects. I’ll follow up on this soon with something on “doing more with less”.

See also: MoD spending plan 2010-2015

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