Supporting a UK Police Force through an end-to-end digital transformation

Across the UK, policing is evolving to protect and serve the public in a digitally led world. The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC)’s Policing 2030 vision aims to build on the successes of the Policing Vision 2025, articulating the need to harness new technology to protect citizens, operate efficiently, and collaborate across partner organisations. In support, the National Policing Digital Strategy (2020 to 2030) outlines five key digital ambitions where technology transformation should focus and invest to address both internal and external pressures.

Our client, a UK police Force, published its own local Technology and Digital strategy, which is aligned to these national strategies and supported by underpinning Technology and Digital Transformation delivery plans. Mason Advisory helped our client’s technology leadership to tackle a wide range of transformation challenges, including IT health and remediation, control room and dispatch technologies, refresh of heritage hardware and software solutions, modernisation of connectivity capabilities, and supplier management.

Challenge

For our client, digital transformation must happen within a complex ecosystem that includes national ministerial directives, regional collaborative partnerships, security and compliance standards, multiple suppliers, and legacy infrastructure nearing end of life. Managing numerous initiatives in a live environment is imperative; ensuring continuity for frontline and control room officers to safeguard the public without downtime risk.

Our client’s internal Technology resource, however, was comparatively small. Limitations in capacity made it challenging to manage multiple time-critical and in-flight projects, while maintaining Business as Usual (BaU) activities. Our client needed to quickly source additional technical and delivery to support them through a challenging period of technology change and operational transition.

Solution

Mason Advisory provided a team of skilled consultants offering decades of experience in digital and IT transformation for the emergency services. Together, they provided essential ongoing expertise and capacity across technical design, solutions architecture, business data and analysis, plus project leadership to ensure coherence between workstreams.

In the area of solutions architecture, we provided comprehensive, hand-on support across multiple workstreams. Initially, we led and managed a comprehensive IT health check programme, including supplier procurement, planning, testing, and remediation work. Crucially, we focused on assuring guaranteed connectivity uptime for critical frontline services during the work, plus aligning all activities with our client’s accreditation and assurance obligations.

We also supported our client in aligning to the NPCC’s National Enabling Programme. Our technical support helped our client to transform their frontline officers’ ability to efficiently support and serve the public. This included a force-wide rollout of new mobile devices, integrating a mobile policing app, and transforming the supporting technology ecosystem to ensure devices are fully supported and compliant with national standards.

While these digital policing initiatives are changing the way frontline officers work, our client’s control room is the critical hub for communications, emergency and non-emergency responses, and dispatch. We provided technical delivery expertise across multiple control room projects. This included planning, managing, and delivering upgrades to the Integrated Communication Control System (ICCS), plus a major upgrade to the next generation Dispatch Communication Server (DCS). The second is a mandatory requirement for all police forces, and a project with an immoveable deadline due to the obsolescence of the current generation of technology.

We also supported our client with the technical planning, review, transition, and delivery of a new, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) solution, replacing the current system. This is another transformation that will enable our client to use modern, digital policing to protect and serve the public in accordance with national and local ambitions and in cooperation with partner emergency services.

Across these workstreams, we used our extensive supplier management expertise to support our client in navigating the supplier ecosystem, negotiating with, and managing suppliers to achieve cost-efficiencies, and secure future-proofed, assured service contracts.

Outcome

As of mid-2023, our client was well on the way to delivering the digital transformation portfolio. They were confident about their readiness to complete the transition to a new Target Operating Model, including a recruitment programme to increase their staffing capacity and reduce their reliance on consultancy support.

We added technical, supplier management, and practical capacity to guide our client through a complex transformation. All initiatives align with the NPCC’s Policing 2030 vision, the National Policing Digital Strategy, and our client’s Technology Strategy.

Most importantly, our work with this client made an important contribution to the force’s ability to engage, protect and serve the public in a modern and collaborative digital environment.

“Bringing Mason Advisory resources into our organisation was an ideal approach for increasing capacity with technical expertise and experience on a temporary basis, in order to deliver some critical high priority projects.”

Head of Technology, representing our client

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