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.

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:

• “Airwave Mobile Email and Personal Organiser – manage emails, calendar and contacts lists away from the station
• Airwave Mobile Validate – PNC/SCRO access plus automated checks against the National Voters Register and Postal Address File
• Airwave Mobile Stop and Search – including mobile printing of forms and tickets
• Airwave Mobile Criminal Intelligence – search local intelligence databases and input ‘5×5’ intelligence reports from the field
• Airwave Mobile Command & Control – including dispatching, viewing and updating incident logs
• Airwave Mobile Driver Validation Service – (DVS) – mobile access to new DVLA drivers details and colour images
• Airwave Mobile Crime Management – investigate and record crimes at the scene and reduce delays and ‘re-keying’ of information in the back office
• Airwave Mobile Self Learning Tools – covering Police National Legal Database (PNLD) and Police Visual Handbook – PVH”

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 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

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:

• Association of Police Forces in Scotland (Strathclyde, Tayside, Northern, Lothian and Borders, Grampian, Fife, Dumfries and Galloway, Central Scotland) – received £2.5 million
• Bedfordshire
• British Transport Police – almost £2m to fund 800 PDAs and printers
• Cambridgeshire
• Cheshire
• East Midlands collaboration (Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire) – £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
• Essex
• Hertfordshire – £1.9m to add 1,000 PDAs and 300 MDTs
• Kent – £1.9m for 1,100 PDAs and 150 mdts
• Lancashire – £3.36m for 2,200 devices
• Metropolitan Police
• Staffordshire – “£3.7m for 1,200 mobiles, ‘and 300 working with the Central Motorway Police Group [MDTs?] and the region’s counter-terrorism unit’
• Thames Valley – 1,100 BlackBerry 8310 Curves to help increase the time bobbies spend on the beat (and they’d snuck a story round the embargo on 7 May, citing £637k in funding)
• Yorkshire collaboration (Humberside, North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire)

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. Secondly, 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.)

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.’

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.

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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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Return to community policing is getting results in Providence, RI

12 November 2007 by Rod McLaren

Colonel Dean Esserman, Police Chief of Providence Rhode Island, gave an interesting talk at Business Innovation Factory 3, 2007. My quick notes:

• There are c.50 murders a day in the US
• Esserman’s son’s bike gets stolen: he calls Dad rather than 911, and dad doesn’t tell him to hang up and call 911. Why? Because crime is intimate, affecting.
• Problem: we no longer know who the police are, despite those collar IDs and name tags. If we don’t know them, why would we go to them when something intimate, affecting happens to us? (We don’t.)
• Therefore: much crime goes unreported to the police. Actually, it is reported, just to personal contacts rather than the police. [Is there also a perception that the police can’t fix things/do anything about it?]
• thus 911 – the promise of a nationwide, predictable and anonymous system of report-and-response for all sorts of emergency – is partially broken. Predictable and anonymous isn’t perhaps what citizens want.
• People do call police for everything else – police as agency of first and last resort. But they’re not calling police about crime, because they don’t know police.
• thus: RI has been pursuing a return to community, neighbourhood policing. Moving back into the community, becoming part of the community again.
• People are beginning to know who the police are again.
• Results: Providence crime is down 5 years in a row, on the same number of officers.
• How are they achieving this? 1. An honest mayor, who “gave the police dept back to the people”, where previously it “was a king’s army”. 2. Rebuilding community policing.
• Patrolmen starting to get calls from the people about what’s going on.
• Esserman hopes that one day people will be able to ask each other ‘Who’s your family cop?’

Would be interesting to contrast this to police experiences in the UK, where there there has been considerable community policing activity in recent years, and is one of the core strands of the Flanagan review.

Disclosure: Some Police Services in the UK are Mobbu customers. (And, frankly, Providence Rhode Island we’d like to have as a customer.)

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That soft, messy people factor

30 July 2007 by Rod McLaren

Last week we were at IQPC’s Mobile Data for Police conference in Birmingham. Alex chaired with panache and I did a talk/workshop on the soft, squishy, messy world of humans meeting process and technology.

The talking part went ok though the discussion bit wasn’t as free-flowing as I’d have liked – but it was always going to be hard doing the graveyard shift on a two day conference in a part of the country that’s under several feet of water.

Afterwards, someone asked me if I was from a psychology background, which was very flattering – actually it’s just an interest of mine that comes from the experiences of doing products and projects for non-consumer use. This material is being worked up into a wider and resolutely amateur body of work on human challenges, behavioural patterns and success factors in technology projects.

It’s on Slideshare (without the notes) and there’s a powerpoint version with notes here as well. It may not make as much sense as if you were there, and I wish I’d had time to do a load of pictures. I have had to take out a couple of references to customers.

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Policing the Tour de France in London

5 July 2007 by Rod McLaren

There’s an interesting article on policing the London stages of 2007’s Tour de France in Pro Cycling’s Official programme, though the article itself isn’t online.

“Basically we’re creating a sterile corridor for the French to take their race through. [...] when we first went to see how things are done at the Tour, we were surprised to see the riders just mixing with the crowds. There are clearly cultural differences in policing styles, so we’re aware we mustn’t “over-police” the event, otherwise it will lose its charm.”

The prologue and first stage will be orchestrated from the Met’s Special Operations Room in Lambeth (the largest in the world apparently, with access to 10,000+ cctv cameras “as well as the possibility of access to up to 60,000 local authority cameras”).

60 officers will man the “pods” – separate sections that deal with certain areas of the Tour de France’s route during its time in Britain. There will be 60-70 cameras covering the 7.9km prologue course alone. “Each pod has three officers, a dispatchers, a writer and a controller.”

More on cross-border cooperation and the need to remain sensitive to differing cultural expectations on the part of the Tour organisation, the riders and French police:

we wanted to use barriers with larger “feet”, which we feel are safer with the crowd numbers expected, but the riders are all used to the smaller feet on the race’s own barriers. [...] We’re more bound by health and safety in the UK; we’re very sterile over here compared to the French police. [...] France’s Garde Republicaine have permission to be on the whole race, but they will be leaving their weapons behind in Calais [as they get on the ferry?!] And all backup vehicles and the race’s caravane are under the French police’s jurisdiction, but they have no powers of arrest, of course, so our own officers will be accompanying them, in case they’re needed.”

2,000 police officers are expected to be present on the ground. (Oh how I wish we’d had the deal and the time to provide them with an application that provided critical field operations information and messaging as well as split times for Millar and Wiggins ...)

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Do touch interfaces increase user expectations?

25 June 2007 by Rod McLaren

I wonder if we have higher expectations of interfaces that feel more natural – for instance mobiles with touch screen and stroke interfaces as compared to those with button, thumbwheel, trackballs, stylus etc interfaces. I was reading the summary of Strategy Analytics’ Positive Learning Curve for Touchscreen Devices report (via MobileCrunch) and Marek’s review of the HTC Touch’s broken experience and got thinking about whether the type of interface directly affects the user’s expectations.

This is my speculative reasoning:

UIs are physically mediated (distanced from us) by things like buttons, and cognitively mediated by the need to roll a wheel to scroll the cursor focus. Perhaps the amount of mediation in between the user and the application is important in setting expectation.

To touch something would be to minimise the distance between human, the interface act and the interface response. So gestural and touch interfaces done well are really good (Nintendo Wii maybe? – haven’t played with it enough to know), and if done poorly – or merely quite well – can seem utterly broken.

With a touch/stroke UI, like the LG Prada, the HTC phone and forthcoming Apple iPhone, your finger is rubbing over the application itself, catching on the UI – it’s practically immersed in the data.

If that’s the case, “more natural” interfaces would be riskier because we bring a higher level of expectation to them (_this should behave as if I’m reaching out and touching, pushing it… because that’s what I’m doing_), and therefore a much lower tolerance for failure. (Are we more forgiving of “less natural” interfaces because we don’t expect them to behave like something “natural”? Do we happily forgive buttons that jiggle loosely in our mobile phones, whilst getting enraged at the touch-screen buttons on ticket machines at train stations?)

That distinction I’ve made between more and less natural is probably pretty shaky: Clifford Nass reminds us that we treat computers like people, which would hint that the buttons that drive an interface “disappear” naturally as we use it, the “unnatural” quickly becoming internalised, innate, habituated to the extent that our bodies react to them unconsciously. The other way to put it is that buttons are exactly what is natural to fingers. (Bill DeRouchey traces the first portable electro-mechanical button back to Ever Ready’s flashlight, 1898, but mechanical ones must go all the way back past typewriters to … what I wonder?) Is there a difference between pointing with a finger and pressing a button, except the obvious one of distance?

[Images courtesy of Apple and Microsoft.]

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Modernising Justice through IT, 2

22 June 2007 by Rod McLaren

Part two of my notes from GovNet’s Modernising Justice through IT event, 12 June 2007 (part one is here), and as before my comments are in square brackets.

[I’m at a conference on using IT to modernise politics and I can’t see any laptops out except mine: the justice community has different very practices and priorities at conferences compared to the reportage- and backchannel-centric behaviour of the internet conference community, for instance.]

Seminar: Delivering information to the front-line (Bedfordshire Police and BlackBerry):

• Beds has 1,200 uniform, 1,000 civilian staff; historically “computerised but not mobilised”
• activity-based costing suggests 50% of officer time spent on in-station updating of systems, paperwork
• Why IT projects fail (according to both users and management): lack of consultation; inappropriate training; insufficient support
• are users more forthcoming with outsiders/consultants? [in our experience police users are very forthright!] used C-Innovate as user liaison
• users wanted: email, PNC, Criminal intelligence, Command&Control
• considerations: other orgs using the solution?; ease of use; functionality; integration; ease of admin [ie does it match up to internal IT team skills. If not, who will support/manage it?]; security; battery life; cost
• buying off-the-shelf and lightly customising: the patrol car analogy [ie buy Fords and put radios in them, rather than commission bespoke PoliceCars]
• 40 users Nov06-Apr07 pilot
• seeking/allowing considerable user involvement but not mandating use. 10-15% of users don’t like it, and won’t ever like it [they tend to resist it from day 1, very hard to recover them with evangelism, even if the device and app are good]. ThamesValley’s WinMobile trial reports similar numbers.
• Standard PNC training programme cut-down because wasn’t enough available officer time; 2-3 days on PNC, 3-4 hours on BlackBerry [note that 1: going mobile might be the first time an officer has directly used PNC; 2: training becomes inconsistent by local needs to get mobility out, so what effect upon training compliance at macro level?] For new officers, mobile becomes the only way to check PNC they ever knew about.
• mobilised: PNC (by NDI briefings (by Airpoint urgent message; CMS2 (crime mgmt system); PNLDB (police legal powers db, via browser?); warrants (via browser); more coming. 5x more PNC checks in a typical shift.
• note neighbourhood officers may have no single, physical HQ to return to anyway, so mobile delivery is key
• Costs: (measured over 3 years) 249 cashable and 182 non-cashable/opportunity cost (training etc) = £431/device/year. [Devices themselves cost 100, and data 10/month, presumably in that 431 figure.] Total outlay 30-40k.
• Benefit measurement: “measuring to excess can cost more than the value of the benefits you’re trying to achieve” [this is the local, in-the-field story that counters the centralised-gov story and measurement culture of CPS, CJIT etc: if funding is local, barriers to proving ROI can be determined locally and set lower ]
• BlackBerry ROI study: “email saves users 63 min/day” [obviously it isn’t quite as simple as that: BlackBerry widows might disagree, and even users cf continuous partial inattention, etc]. For Beds: 1 hr/day @ £22/hour * 180 working days = 3.9k/device/year benefit. [also, what about the non-tangible ROI: when users like the app+device they feel more positive (viz Crackberry effect), also there’s inevitably higher usage, better quality data, and a much reduced training and device replacement cost because devices don’t mysteriously get broken or lost]
• BlackBerry: NPIA say there are 8,000 mobile data devices currently in UK policing, and BB claim to have 7,000 BBs deployed. [Reason: no large-scale Win mobile (why not?) or Airwave/WinMob deployments yet (not in market yet?)]
• CESG recently approved BB Curve for Restricted data use [and they’re working on Confidential data use, which IMPACT will require]
• BlackBerry think that mobile data business models will switch from flat-rate-all-you-can-eat as takeup grows [recent evidence suggests flat rate is growing though]
• Q: any evidence yet that speedy image dissemination gets results (aka the “golden hour”). A: yes, anecdotally.
• Q: use at courts. A: GSL’s prisoner transport and management at periodic courts – all done on BB [disclosure, that’s us]
• Q: Cheshire police user in audience pipes up to say his Blackberry is a godsend – got work done on the train on the way down etc
• [good seminar, great stats, and Bedfordshire are a good cheerleader for Blackberry]

Seminar: Practical Steps for Multi-Agency Criminal Justice Information Management (Sponsored by Northgate Information Solutions and Initiate Systems):

• Rob Watts, Northgate
  • 29% of analyst time spent searching for information. “Lots of data, but little information”.
  • [and in summing up:] success requires thoughtful procurement, incremental approaches [rather than BDUF], and agile development needs flexible procurement.
• [good common sense from] Daniel Batts, Microsoft CJ and Public Safety
  • Shows the [nastily complex] communities of interest slide from the Home Office’s Information, Systems and Technology Strategy 2007-8 report
  • what’s the right information?: Knowing what to gather, what to do with it, what to pass on [and to whom], and how to value the result.
  • younger users have higher expectations. [Google generation; and the thought often occurs that a good short-term fix to some of these information challenges might be to run a Google Enterprise box over the data source and provide training in search queries…]
  • success factors: secure proactive executive sponsorship; leadership to drive [top-down?] collaborative culture, partnerships, standards; define info mgmt flows by business process not by hierarchical silos; more decision making to the process [local, lateral]
• Chris Westphal, Visual Analytics [which looks like a fairly simple words-on-sticks approach to the underlying data, though that may be an artefact of the seminar format. Chris should get Stamen in to take the visual aspect further.]
  • [However, this is good stuff:] Data quality issues: poor collection instruments [and the inevitable disconnects between context of collection and that of eventual use]; information not verified; inconsistent or incomplete data (typos, no cross-refs, blank/test data); errors in data; misrepresentation of data (un/intentional). Process issues: how to make data meaningfully actionable]?
  • larger the data set and the more “human interaction” it has, the more data inconsistency there will be [then demonstrates the power of sqling to show humans are inconsistent. Or lie.]
• James Wilkinson, Initiate – Initiate Hub entity resolution to achieve “the golden nominal … single trusted view of the ‘truth’” [ie it’s a sieve for meaning that should result in genuinely unique identifiers, the database state’s dream. Trusted by enforcement, but what about citizens?]
• Simon Blades, Northgate: Intelliframe [horrible visual metaphor of a set of modules that looks like a street map view or grid but boundaried by pipes that seem to weave in and out of each other in the manner of Escher. Edward Tufte would have a heart attack]. Expect COTS not code.

Managing Justice: C-NOMIS – Linking the Prison and the Probation Services – Mike Manisty, Director, Offender Information Services, CIO, National Offender Management Service :

• [Very encouraging to hear him start by mentioning people: those that pass through the system and the wider body of citizens the system serves]
• C-NOMIS – 75,000 users, 1.500 locations, replaces 140 separate instances of prisoner db. [C-NOMIS based on Syscon’s TAG application, buffed up by EDS]
• Offender mgmt model delivers – (for offenders) continuity, consistency, commitment, consolidation; (for offender mgmt) control, collaboration, commissioning, cost [reduction]
• insiders: 300,000 staff on GSI or CJX-based islands, often closed silos; outsiders: 200,000 users
• “coherence in complex world of offender management” – people on the ground making genuine commitment [he’s a believer, and funny]
• C-NOMIS live at Albany prison Dec 2006 [will be interesting to hear if NOMS is able to force C-NOMIS upon privately-run prisons without re-negotiating the contracts]

The IT Industry Role in Modernising Justice – Mike Grundy, Managing Consultant, Public Sector, Steria :

• scope of modernisation: joining up; delivering services to citizens directly; shared service agenda[e]
• core IT: CJS infrastructure; modular CJS process design and apps; info access and exchange
• Steria activity: probation 13 years; CJIT 2yrs; Pol N.I. 20yrs; command and control for half the forces in UK.
• clear acceptance of responsibility and risks on both sides; geared to lowest overall risk profile for the programme
• organisational and policy [and user] demands for quick results VS the extended timescales of major change projects; in CJ orgs natural objectives can conflict with local reqs
• Inhibitors to IT [success]: shortage of inhouse resource [so often!]; no access to users [so often!]; over-reliance on 3rd party advisors; model contract form (OGC), which can promote unnecessarily adversarial relationships; procurement process, which encourage big bang projects and inflexible contracts whilst discouraging proper allocation of risk
• Intellect framework
• Critical success factors: full scoping of change factors; clarity of start point; strong leadership and joint governance; full funding; delivery
• ‘We plea not to be held at arms length, but to be really involved and engaged,’

Wiring Up Youth Justice – supporting improved end-to-end sentence management in the youth justice system – Brendan Finegan, Director of Strategy, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales :

• 25% of people passing through Crim Justice system are juvenile
• historically: paperwork in yellow envelopes transferred with the youth (high % lost), soon to be replaced by secure email-based electronic system, Eye

Closing Keynote Address – Lord Laming, Chairman, The Victoria Climbie Inquiry :

• “every crime is a threat to the social fabric” [manages to say this without sounding like an authoritarian!] – criminal acts change social behaviour
• low income not necessarily cause of crime [Telegraph has a recent, controversial piece on the four causes of crime how to reinforce social fabric?
• Organisational structures are less important than values and leadership, however independence of judiciary is key [this is his heartfelt and angry aside: the gov is making a mistake]
• case study: social service departments in councils, for cradle-to-grave service. “one door easily accessible to all”. Now: BlackBerrys, laptops, all info electronic. No paper case files were transferred to the new call centres. The cost saving is going back into service delivery.
• [he’s passionate about improving things]

[The second half of the day allays some of my fears that the human element won’t be entirely obscured under the weight of information collating, analysing and sharing technology. I would have likely to have heard more about the budgets for these programmes: many police services are talking of very tight budgets and some are operating at loss currently. Presumably then, IT programmes must demonstrate cost-saving as well as expanding capability.]

Afterwards we emerge from the conference to find a couple of blocks of Victoria cordoned off by police: part of a building has collapsed and at the time, no-one is sure if it’s an accident or a bombing. The police, fire, ambulance and urban search and rescue teams all seem to be fairly “joined-up”, but by their actions more than their technology, and with their good humour with grumpy commuters.

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Modernising Justice through IT, 1

14 June 2007 by Rod McLaren

Part one of my notes from GovNet’s Modernising Justice through IT event, 12 June 2007.

Generally, it was very good and informative. If I were to find fault it would be that there wasn’t quite enough time for meeting people. Some of the talks were a little encumbered with consulting speak but none of them were poor, which was impressive. It’s clear that the Justice ecosystem has a lot of talented people working in it, and everyone is very committed to making things better.

Mobile readers may find the Blackberry/Bedfordshire Police case study interesting (and my thanks to our partners at RIM who got us into the event at short notice). My comments are in square brackets.

Sir Michael Bichard, former Permanent Secretary for the Department of Education and Employment (now DfES), and Chair of the Soham Inquiry :

• [Bichard is best known for chairing the inquiry into the Soham murders – his reports 2004 and subsequent implementation progress reports 2004-7 pointed the finger at intelligence failures and poor data management in Police organisations. Several other speakers will refer to Bichard’s inquiry and recommendations, which are sufficiently canonic now that they sometimes take the abbreviated form “Bichard 7” and so on. These notes won’t capture it, but he is very impressive: the sense of an enormous competence, worn lightly.]
• we should be integrating IT [with process and people], not just adding it [throwing it at them]
• issues: of trust, information sharing challenges, of gov[’s record of] IT delivery
• “IT is the only way to deliver affordable, high-quality public services”
• it may be that IT becomes a [barometer, ie a visible measure] of whether we’re delivering successfully
• [later when questioned on progress since his inquiry, Bichard says that he sees some good progress, but some programmes – eg IMPACT NI and Police Natnl DB particularly – are going far too slow. “There’s a huge amount happening, but we’re not yet at the point where we have a joined-up system”]

A Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century – Alex Allan, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Justice :

• funny anecdote about editing a Nigel Lawson speech with scissors when it was already being delivering from a tape-based autocue [Allan is confident, funny, and reassures us that there are clever people running things on the inside of government]
• Joined-up justice: partnership working with organisations outside of the Criminal Justice System; securing trust through IT-enabled performance
• about people’s lives, service delivery to citizens, not just about efficiency.
• complexity in courts and in wider CrimJustice system: “Delivering justice is… hard” [an orchestration of people challenge as much as anything]
• cites CJIT-led projects Compass – CPS case management; Xhibit – court hearing management [not to be confused with Xzibit, west coast rapper ]; OASys – offender assessment
• how do we “drive out” the business benefits [ensure they happen] – can’t just stick IT into operations and do a bit of training.
• Cites Varney report 2006 [on public service delivery and transformation] and Steinberg’s Power of Information Review 2007

Information Systems: enabling the right environment for world class prosecution – Claire Hamon Director, Business Information Systems, Crown Prosecution Service :

• we need to “recognise that technology in and of itself has little value” – need to integrate into people and into business processes. A people-led approach to transformation.
• expect to invest 10% of the dev budget [annually] just to stay at the same level
• “liberating assets” [sounds like: providing an API]: CPS’s witness mgmt systems now used by more police users than CPS users
• Progress system (case progression tool) to go live in 2007
• growing financial awareness: project/programme/IT discipline, professionalism
• benefits measurement: benchmarking to meet criteria for future funding conditions
• nb that Joining Up can also increase system dependencies [risk]
• fixing process: “if you automate a broken business process, you get a broken automated process…”

[Everyone’s language is carefully “business” rather than “public sector”, part of the programme to re-present government as improving/fixed.]

NPIA IMPACT: Providing 21st century solutions for 21st century crime – Nick Tofiluk, Assistant Chief Constable [West Mids Police?], IMPACT Programme Director, National Policing Improvement Agency :

• problem: local force databases, poor access inter- and intra-force. The historic local/inward context and focus understandable [but must stop, he’s saying]
• key projects – IMPACT nominal index, Police Nat db, MoPI
• IMPACT nominal index: currently 50m records, will have 75m, with 170k checks made to date [doesn’t sound like a large number]
• Police National Database: “connectivity” between data/org silos, people, objects, locations and events; being tendered currently, earliest deployment 2009-2010; aims: reduce crime, increase safety-security (incl officer safety), public reassurance [with the nominal index, is this a key plank of the National Identity Register project?]
• national db: “the possible permutations in 70m [connected] records is infinite” [said as if plenitude will solve everything]
• MoPI – standards for data, code of practice; full police force compliance planned for 2010
• [it has to be said that the rebrand from PITO seems to be working: these guys do sound more credible now]

[So that’s four polished performers in a row. Thus far, the main themes are:

• the criminal justice system is really complex
• people and business processes are more important than technology, but…
• information is the silver bullet, particularly access-to-, capturing-more, connected- and analysis-of…
• so connect everything together [in fact, there’s so much talk of connected information, it feels like the people are disappearing]
• top-down programmes of transformational change will get the job done]

Reducing the burden of Audit Compliance in UK Police – a Kent Police Case Study – Andy Barker, Head of IT, Kent Police (and Peter Regent, Novell):

• ACPO IS Community Security Policy – compliance reqs
• problems: many disparate audit logs, time consuming harvesting, reactive audit analysis, frustrated security teams, systems over-complex so eg the Professional Standards people come direct to IT rather than having their own access…
• thus: “number of trusted employees is too high” [trusted with high levels of access]
• Peter Regent, Novell: Sentinel product – “remediation workflow”
• [So here audit means: surveillance of own users for security or process breaches (the staff who spend too long on eBay), rather than audits that present information proving service delivery to the citizens they represent. I wonder what motivation impacts there are on staff using networks and systems when they realise how closely their activity is being monitored.]

Joining Up the Criminal Justice System Enabled Through IT – Tunde Coker, Chief Information Officer, Criminal Justice Information Technology :

• CJS ecosystem: 2% of the UK workforce
• core systems: XI exchange, Xhibit portal, secure email, Progress portal
• Bichard 7: court data coming through to police
• stages: underpinning frameworks (“the heavy lifting”); light touch integration; extend/integrate CJ IT, web
• [10:35 – day’s first mention of youth and social software]
• Virtual courts prototype: defence and prosecution at a police station, court at a magistrate’s court, document collaboration and videoconferencing in between.

Q and A following the first six talks

• Q: All this talk about more info, more connected. What about garbage-in-garbage-out? What about training? A, CPS: Yes. 6,000 trained and within 3mo of app(s) going live, subsequent deskside support. However, new systems tend to change processes themselves, so need to adapt both the training and system itself [in response]. CPS user: “it’s our system [now], we change it”. A, CJIT: make apps that are easier to use and easier to train
• Q: The CJS “ringfenced” budget ends March08, so how do we ensure that benefit realisation doesn’t collapse into a local/parochial/blinkered process? A, NPIA: Do services realise that given PND, there may be cost savings internally, so retaining big picture view critical
• Q: impact of HO/MofJ split upon joined-up justice? A, CPS: [talked smoothly of it being positive development, but seemed like fluff]
• Q from Bichard: what about [legacy] mistrust between agencies? A, CPS: trusts people and relationships, but less so the information unless she understands the business process that generated it [and inadvertently puts her finger on one of the problems of top-down systems: to everyone, top-down seems like a distant person who just doesn’t get it. This also seems to obliquely answer the question. Cross-agency and cross-person trust is a real issue and I believe it only starts to get solved when X provides something to Y that tangibly makes Y’s work easier.]
• Q: What about the DDA? A, everyone: oh yes, it’s important.
• Q, Cumbria police officer: [if you’re doing all this good stuff, then] why can’t we send an electronic file to the CPS yet? Xerox is our most important tool, still! A, CPS: we have the technology, yes, but it’s an issue of business process, legals (including “wet signatures” [original, ink]), resilience, police systems, and not just a CPS problem. A, CJIT: systemically, we still have a lot of paper in the system. Needs tech-business-legal alignment. [All of which is true, but illustrates one of the persistent soft problems: staff in the field do not care about business process – all of this stuff is (rightly) irrelevant to them. They just want the problems to go away and to do their job well.]

[At this point, it feels like the people – the users in the criminal justice system, the citizens it serves, and the offenders it manages – have been somewhat forgotten in the talk of technology serving business processes, and super-connected information and data.]

Part two soon.

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Mobile Monday London: widgets

15 May 2007 by Rod McLaren

The major themes at MoMo London, 14 May 07, were:

• super-easy for users (find, install, use)
• inspired by web content, and/or: best way to mobilise existing web content. (The implicit assumption is that all innovation necessarily comes from the web and then gets versioned for other platforms, which seems an exaggeration.)
• building on or making accessible to the much larger web development community. Therefore: directly using web technology, and in some cases open source/standards.
• need for standardisation/interoperability
• entirely too much quoting of “long tail”, “web2.0” and “mashups”

OK, here are the raw notes, with my comments in [square brackets]:

David Pollington, Vodafone:

• users want at a glance info, quick access, fill their dead time without having to launch a browser or do a search
• “bubble gum presentation format”
• widget chrome stored locally
• leverage web dev technology and the dev community.
• discovery: can a user simply enter a url to find the widgets that belong to it?
• user creation via templates
• aggregated presentation, like a carousel
• future: contextualising/mashups, “widget lego” [a lovely metaphor but drag and drop programming always seems to falls short of the promise, even Yahoo Pipes]

Anwar Ahmed, uiOne (Qualcomm):

• OTA-updatable
• SDK with simulator “for authenticated BREW developers” [sounds like RIM’s controlled approach with BlackBerry]
• trigs: app, triglet: content, actors: api between UI layer and OEM layer, depot: backend [obscure terminology]
• operator could sell a music phone with a music UI
• [Presumably the USP is the very deep integration to core phone features plus ease of porting, though it lives in BREW-world only.]

Cees Van Dok, Frog Design:

• Demoing Celltop [after a long sales pitch of an IDEOesque methodology: discovery -> many ideas -> 3 concepts -> develop 1 concept]
• Celltop’s aims: monetisable (increase data usage), deployable, innovative, delightful
  • launched Jan 07, Q1 subs +8%, Q1 data rev +64%
• built on uiOne/BREW
• softkey launched, horizontal carousel, side-by-side “cells”, no vertical scrolling, has buy/install hooks [it looks like a device UI on top of a device UI. Perhaps this is what Virtual BlackBerry on Winmobile will fell like…]
• Frog is part of Avicent (big dev house/services co)
• “convergent user experiences” [= ovens with lcd screens seemingly, but he was going at pace so that’s probably unfair]
• [Can you write your own cells? Was it co-funded by Qualcomm as a uiOne showcase?]

Ganesh Sivaraman, Nokia S60:

• 100mm devices shipped on S60, 50% market share
• S60/3rd edition browser: full html, webkit based etc [he’s pushing the open source story hard]
• bring full desktop-like experience, web2.0, “widgetising web 2.0”
• Web Runtime, widgets run on it, also could use to extend native C apps
• for [web] developers: familiar, rapid, simple. 5 day dev time if you already have a desktop widget.
• “fully standards compliant, nothing proprietary here … tie the power of the web to the power of the platform”
• N95 an awesome phone [he loves this stuff. Passionate evangelist.]
• Christian Lindholm from the floor: “Does it run on the idle screen?” “No [presumably because operators won’t let us]” “Why not?!”

Charles McCathieNevile, standards pirate at Opera [three capitals in your surname, and without hyphens: my two are utterly trumped]:

• Opera: 40mm desktops, 40mm phone browsers, 10mm Opera Mini phone browsers
• “putting the web everywhere”
• not all mobile devices are phones (Wii, DS, etc) – diversity is increasing [ie phones aren’t actually swallowing everything that’s mobile]
• 1k widgets, 100k widgetised pages; mobile for S60, WinMob
• sent draft widget packaging spec to W3C [he’s understandably pretty hardcore about standards and interop]
• Issues: signing and trusting widgets, messaging between mutually trusted widgets, documentation, security, true interoperability
• varying widget engines: Opera S60, Yahoo/Konfabulator, Apple/Dashboard, AOL etc
  • portability: Opera -> AOL in 10min, -> Dashboard is harder, -> Y/Konfab = forget it.
• Opera built time-tracking widget [desktop only?]
• [entertaining guy]

[To this point, it was if each presentation was raising the stakes on the last. uiOne < S60 < Opera/open, etc. As I tired, the quality of notes had completely hit the wall at this point.]

Florent Pitoun, Webwag:

• vision: 50% of net users will have personalised start pages [hmm, seems unlikely unless Google personalising your search page for you counts]
• shows website widgetiser [works very well], and widget-to-widget communication on handset [Webwag looks like a Netvibes/Pageflakes-style home page, with widgetising pixie dust sprinkled on]
• [how open/standardsy is this?]

Ray Anderson, Bango:

• [Bango are a big mobile on-ramp/intermediary for content providers]
• 18mm users
• interesting numbers on calls-to-action: send both sms and wap-push message: 35% of recipients access the url; send one of sms or wap-push only: 18% success; url only? 3% success
• [not entirely following this but Ray seems to be thinking about mobile widgets as an addressable medium, which has the echo of the Bango numbers they originally back in 1999ish]

Kaj HeGe Haggman, Widsets (Nokia):

• Widsets launched Oct06. 1mm registered users [widget on mobile = widset]
• downloadable widget engine
• 1,350 widgets, most made via templates by users
• runs on other devices, eg BlackBerry

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