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Supporting organisational transformation
Steria and the Police Service of Northern Ireland work together to transform the use of IT within the service...
In a constantly changing and challenging environment, Steria’s flexible and professional approach to managed service delivery has proved invaluable to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The customer
In 2001, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the Royal Ulster Constabulary became The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). This represented a significant evolution in the bid to create a police force that is representative of the entire community. Committed to providing the people of Northern Ireland with the best police service in the world, PSNI employs 13,500 staff, comprising full time staff, part time staff, and civilian support staff.
The project
"The proposed revisions for the policing services in Northern Ireland are the most complex and dramatic changes ever attempted in modern history." So began the first report of the Oversight Commissioner, the man charged with the responsibility of monitoring the transformation of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in line with the recommendations of the Patten Report. These words reflected the sheer scale of the transformation, at both organisational and operational level, that the PSNI had to achieve. It’s a change process that is currently underway – and one of the cornerstones underpinning the changes was a transformation in the use of IT within the service.
PSNI was moving away from a historically centralised model to a way of working that devolved a great deal of control to a more local level. It was understandably imperative that its ICT infrastructure reflected this change, giving officers in local stations access to the applications needed to support their work.
To enable this, PSNI wanted to install a new common desktop infrastructure at all the individual police stations, on which all their key applications could run securely. The service chose Windows 2000 as the ideal basis for this. With the role of ICT in policing becoming ever more important at the same time, PSNI also wanted to ensure that every officer would be able to use a PC when necessary. Yet in a shift-based environment, there was no need for each officer to have his or her own computer. Instead, the PSNI needed to enable users to access all the applications they needed through a single sign-on approach.
This increased role for ICT across the whole of the service necessarily entailed a major increase in the management and support burden – a burden that PSNI’s own ICT team weren’t equipped to handle, as David Rogers, Project Manager at PSNI, explains. "I’ve always believed that – to take just one example – programmers should be programmers, not systems administrators. We want to use our team’s specialist skills in the best way possible, and recruiting new staff with the appropriate skills to manage this growing infrastructure would have been very difficult within the necessary timescales."
It was in response to this challenge that PSNI decided to increase its use of external service provision, and it turned to long-term partner Steria to establish a new service contract that would not only cover the management and support of the new infrastructure, but also offer a range of other key skills to support short term projects and drive long-term change.
Why Steria?
PSNI had been working with Steria and its predecessors for almost twenty years, and recognised that the company had an excellent understanding of PSNI’s culture and systems.
What’s more, the working relationship between the two organisations – particularly at the project management level – was incredibly strong and open.
This experience was backed up by the extensive range and depth of skills that Steria had at its disposal – a fact particularly welcomed by Harry Kissock, Technical Manager, PSNI. "The technical ability of Steria’s staff is impressive, not least because they seem to have so many people of real quality."
Above all though, what marked Steria out was its willingness to be flexible. "Our business environment is one of constant change," David Rogers explains, "so we needed an adaptive organisation as our partner. Steria showed that it could meet our requirements, and take an approach that didn’t depend on comprehensively documenting every small change before implementing it."
Benefits and features
Steria has given PSNI the additional skills and support it has needed to drive the IT transformation, providing:
• Implementation and management of a Windows 2000 architecture across 6,500 workstations and supporting some 14,000 users
• Management of AccessMaster, a single sign-on/User management solution
• Virus protection for 7,000 devices, including servers
• Management of a Citrix server farm
• 24x7 systems monitoring and technical support
• Effective management of sub-contractors and suppliers - including installing and linking applications from 3rd party suppliers
• Unix / AIX
• SAP / HRMS
• Prince 2 compliant project management and ITIL based service desk and fault management
The results
PSNI knew that it was looking for something that went beyond traditional outsourcing, and in its partnership with Steria, it has found exactly that.
The decentralised ICT architecture is operating smoothly, and whenever there is a problem it is handled effectively.
"Steria just helps us get the show on the road, and asks questions later," points out Harry Kissock. That’s proved particularly important as user expectations have risen too: for instance, if there’s a service incident, the PSNI helpdesk is flooded with calls almost immediately. And whilst Steria isn’t in the front line when it comes to handling calls, the approach taken in dealing with internal customers has been exemplary. It’s all been part of a wider commitment and approachability that has really impressed PSNI.
"Our own staff have always had an extraordinary commitment to the task," David says. "When you move to a managed service, you ask yourself whether that will be maintained. But Steria’s staff have been equally committed."
That commitment is demonstrated in some of the projects that fall beyond the typical managed service remit, such as Steria’s work to integrate third party applications and systems, and supporting new rollouts and developments.
"The technical ability of their staff is excellent," Harry Kissock adds. "We have a very wide range of technologies and they have been able to cope with them all. That’s incredibly valuable when you think about how long it would have taken us to recruit people with the skills we needed"
"The two keywords," David Rogers concludes, "are flexibility and professionalism. Whether we’re talking about the Steria employees that work on site with us or the account managers, they all seem to work together extremely well and get the job done. We feel we can trust them and they respond to that. It’s an excellent working relationship."
Steria in Police
Policing today is increasingly IT-centric. In the field, forces need greater ability to identify suspects, respond rapidly to incidents and deploy resources as effectively as possible. Behind the scenes, information needs to be shared between forces, and increasingly – in the fight against terrorism and other international crimes – across national boundaries, securely and swiftly.
On top of all of this, police forces are also only too aware of the imperative to reduce bureaucracy, without compromising services or accessibility.
Steria is widely experienced in working with police forces across the UK and beyond, delivering solutions that reflect the real needs of policing today. From our STORM Command and Control solution – a Steria-developed software solution that is used by a number of UK forces – to document management and workflow solutions to cutting-edge Biometrics, Steria is equipped to help police forces tackle 21st century crime, flexibility and professionalism.
