Western Australia Police Force has invested the last two years reorganising, simplifying and elevating its Technology function and capabilities, and will now support that with a suite of new ICT services and skills.
Speaking to the iTnews Podcast, chief technology officer Marc Smith provided some of the backstory and context for “one of Australia’s largest ICT tenders”, which will be issued to the market today.
The Force is splitting two long-standing ICT services arrangements into six packages of work – help desk, disaster recovery and asset management; cyber security; infrastructure services; end user computing; and application development services for Microsoft and Oracle.
Behind-the-scenes, a considerable amount of lead-up and preparatory work has culminated in the tender being announced.
Some of that work was to present an elevated role for technology in supporting both frontline officers and community safety.
“Technology is one of the critical enablers to make that happen,” Smith said.
There has also been investment in readying the technology function to take on this elevated role.
“Internally, we’re an enabler and a service provider, so it’s about being better aligned with the specific facets that police officers come to us for support,” Smith said.
Smith has overseen a shift in the way technology projects are managed, moving from a “federated” structure where Agile teams ran their own self-contained projects, to a more traditional plan-build-run model, where IT teams have a more singular domain focus.
Those domains are reflected in the division of work that WA Police has defined as part of its tender – and the ICT services that come in as part of that process will particularly support the ‘run’ part of that plan-build-run model.
“The biggest thing in the ‘run’ side of the business is keeping the lights on in a very sustainable and effective way,” he said, noting that would be delivered through ICT and application development services.
Part of running efficiently is also about optimising available resources to work on more innovative programs that are supported by technology.
“Keeping the lights on is only 50 percent of the job; the other 50 percent is how do you create headroom for all the new stuff that’s coming at you and transition all that work in.
“We want to help delivery teams operationalise and productionize new technologies, so that they can [then] move on to new projects and new innovations.”
“Part of our journey over the last 12 months has been getting the build-plan-run and organisational models to work a lot more efficiently so that we can set ourselves up for the innovation that is coming down the pipeline,” Smith said.
Innovation work will be supported both by WA Police’s internal workforce, as well as by external technology partners.
Innovation areas
Smith highlighted three areas of innovation that come under the Force’s IT strategy.
The first of these is investment in resilience and cyber security.
“We are a mission-critical organisation,” Smith said. “Everything we do needs to operate when ‘everything else’ is not working.”
A second area with significant transformation potential is improving field operational capabilities for frontline officers.
This encompasses a focus on mobility, but one that is much broader than earlier device-centric efforts.
“Most people see mobility as an app on a phone, but for us, that’s just one aspect of it,” Smith said.
“It’s also about how we integrate devices and bring data into vehicles, and how we use things like our body-worn cameras to bring in other types of analytics and forms of information.
“So, it’s the whole experience around a mobile ‘office’ rather than just a mobile app.”
The third area of focus is around responsible information sharing.
“It’s good for us to have access to data, but it’s about having that data in context at the right time in front of the right people so that we can make either the appropriate risk assessments or share the appropriate aspects of the information available,” Smith said.
“That’s probably our biggest area of innovation – and it’s not just growing inside policing itself. It’s also how we work with our various partner agencies like health and communities to make sure that the right information is shared across the boundaries.”
WA Police said companies wishing to register for access to the request for tender documentation are asked to refer to the Tenders WA Website.