As a newcomer to the criminal justice locale, with little previous knowledge of the history of police IT policy, the objectives of the new ISIS programme seem wholly sensible; an intelligent coordination of procurements across the 44 police authorities to drive efficiencies, a drive to improve interoperability and an overall objective to improve police productivity.
The power struggle between actors trying to implement cross-authority objectives and the 44 independent minded police authority chiefs persists, but must be overcome if the police are to embrace technological advancement, without digging themselves into an interoperability nightmare.

The idea of the re-use of information is a key objective emerging from the new police information strategy, with an emphasis on giving the public access to information, crime mapping and a focus on the public outcome. Although un-related, it appears that this tangential objective may serve to help the police forces drive efficiency and implement policy across the forces.

The public wants access to reliable and consistent information about how safe their neighbourhoods are, regardless of police authority boundaries. In the internet era, public services must learn to embrace technology, and really interact with the public to improve public services. And technological change will happen regardless of boundaries, the question is will the police be driven by technological change or will they drive the change themselves?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Defence and Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.