The policing & security landscape is increasingly complex, unpredictable and interconnected. Increasingly, police and security organisations have to operate in turbulent environments with unexpected changes, uncertainty and lack of control, complex decisions, group inter-dependencies, demand for efficiency and high performance and unclear and fuzzy boundaries. This provides a powerful argument for the need for a holistic, integrated and often ‘transformational’ approach to business change, pulling together expertise and experience from both the public and private spheres, to produce a coherent and appropriate organisational response to the operational and organisational challenges of the twenty-first century. The ability of a police organisation and its partners to identify and fully respond to risks and public and stakeholder requirement’s depends on creating a connected policing system that develops and brings together staff skills and capabilities, appropriate knowledge and evidence-based practice supported and enabled by the right technologies.
In past decades, the traditional operational advantages of the police (radio communications, mobility, forensics, PNC, intelligence etc.) have been eroded as criminals and those who threaten to undermine the peace and security of communities have themselves become much more mobile, have access to instant mobile communications and internet access, utilise VOIP- based secure communication and social media networks. We believe that the decisive feature of how police forces regain operational advantage and meet the challenge of providing more and better policing with less is how forces dynamically create and deploy knowledge to gain decision advantage at strategic, operational and tactical levels. With our deep understanding of UK Police Services and national security agencies, and our experience of delivering complex transformation programmes, we have developed a new approach to designing solutions that is encapsulated within the Knowledge Enabled Policing (KEP) philosophy. This is whole business systems approach for policing that encompasses strategy, architectures, business rules, processes, working practices, people and the enabling technologies in ‘lean’ end to end design.
KEP addresses both the Demand Management and Resource Management functions within Policing and Security organisations. Central to its operations is the ‘Decision Support and Intervention Platform’ which is underpinned by a knowledge and information hub that ensures that context-specific knowledge is available to the right people, at all levels, in a timely fashion that allows them to make superior operational and business decisions. KEP provides enhanced operational situation awareness so that the force can see and understand current, predicted and emergent demands in time and space through a ‘threat, risk, prevention and reduction’ lens. The ‘system’ can see all available and potentially available resources including their location, skills, capability and availability. This allows the force to deploy, allocate or otherwise utilise all resources (people and other resource) in the most intelligent way against business rules related to harms, threats, risks and other outcome priorities.
The knowledge capability permeates the whole organisation system and is channelled into a new ‘networked’ operating model that connects all the organisational components and assets and, where possible, relevant components of partner agencies, integrating knowledge with decision support tools and a system of services and deployments within a wider command and control environment. The knowledge infrastructure will drive smarter, more precise activity and intervention at all levels and gives strategic and front line decision makers the technical, contextual and situational knowledge to make superior interventions to deal with threats and harms and solve policing problems at source.
