Kent Policehas rolled
out hundreds of business intelligence "dashboards" to give its
6,500 officers a means of identifying and targeting crime outbreaks
in their areas.
The innovative move shows how dashboards can be used across an
organisation to improve performance.
The force is using business intelligence software from
Business Objects to track crime patterns. The
data is displayed on dashboards, which are published on its
intranet.
Kent Police head of IT Andy Barker said, "[With the dashboards]
we are bringing together many more datasets. Business Objects is
looking at crime trends and crime theory. It means officers can
scrutinise whether there are links between crime types and crime
events."
The business intelligence tool extracts data from Kent Police's
operational policing system, called Genesis, and its Holmes II
intelligence-gathering application.
The force has 150 power-users preparing the dashboards for use
by front-line officers. Of these, 20 spend their time exclusively
analysing crime data to produce outputs that can benefit front-line
policing.
Kent Police also uses SAP Business Warehouse to produce
management reports from its SAP finance, human resources, payroll
and duty planning applications.
The force said it used Business Objects as well as SAP because
it needed a second system to mine data from its proprietary crime
reporting applications.
The IT department decided to introduce business intelligence for
front-line officers after its then head of IT visited Tesco's team
of business analysts several years ago.
Barker said, "We have tried to learn from how Tesco analyses
data. We look at areas of high crime and what we can do about them.
More and more, we are pulling in datasets that we have not included
before."
Kent Police has cut its IT costs dramatically over the last 12
months by moving all its core applications on to Novell Open
Enterprise Server - the supplier's version of SuSE Linux.
The force cut its hardware costs by 90% when it migrated Holmes
II onto Dell Poweredge servers running SuSE Linux last summer. It
moved the SAP applications and its Genesis policing systems in the
second half of 2006.
Related articles:
How Kent cut costs with Linux SuSE
Business Objects deployment at Staffordshire Police
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