National Digital Policing – Discovery
DPP Digital First Landscape Review
Customer: National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC)
CLIENT BRIEF
Sarax was commissioned to provide a solution which would enable the NPCC Digital First (DF) portfolio to understand the complex and diverse landscape in relation to storage, handling and transfer to other agencies of digital evidence by 44 UK police forces.
WHAT WE DID
Sarax were required to rapidly overcome the initial challenges of understanding and operating within a complex network of policing and legal requirements along with delineating 17 types of digital evidence.
From our client consultation, it was clear that a user-friendly review solution was required to harvest the maximum amount of information from police forces. This led to the development of our Landscape Mapping Tool and processes.
HOW WE DID IT
Sarax created and applied our Landscape Mapping Tool, carrying out extensive consultation with the client to understand the required questions, potential answers, and appropriate language cues. Our solution required:
- The development of a state-based form to ensure that police forces did not have to see more questions than they needed to (a selection from over 1,000 questions)
- The design and implementation of a web based front end for ease of use
- The design and implementation of a back of house database for ease of information extraction and presentation
- A ‘right first time’ solution
- Travel with the client to all forces to communicate the aims of the review
- Management of technical issues for the responders
- Consideration of early feedback and answers to focus on areas of interest
- Compiling a comprehensive report to summarise the findings and identify the gaps in force maturity and readiness.
Based on the responses, we worked closely with our client to provide a report on the state of policing giving a number of recommendations that could be clearly understood both in terms of status and impact.
THE WORKS
Sarax was able to provide an evidence-based assessment that ongoing investment in disjointed local force solutions would be cost and process inefficient. It was concluded that a national cloud-based solution with common interfaces would enable the maximum benefit to policing to be realised.
Building on the Landscape Review report we established a business case that obtained Home Office funding of £40m per annum for the DPP. We provided services to the Digital Public Contact and DF programmes within the new portfolio.
TOP 5 BENEFITS
- Identification of the gaps in force maturity and readiness
- Identification of the gaps between police forces nationally and the Common Platform Programme (CPP)
- Identification that a national service for evidence transfer between police forces and CPP was a cost-effective solution
- NPCC accepted the case for the DPP
- £40m per annum Home Office funding for DPP.
VALUE ADD
- Building a Landscape Review Tool and processes that succeeded where others had failed
- Presenting a concise and complete picture by using a holistic approach to understand diverse and disparate processes, users, and stakeholders
- Removing preconceived ideas and eliminating assumptions along the way
- Presenting practical roadmaps for solutions to what had previously appeared insoluble problems.