According to the Home Office, since 2003 the UK police staff numbers have dropped to their lowest level and previously police forces’ budgets all over the Wales and England have seen forceful cuts. At the end of March 2012, the overall number of full-time equivalent officers was about 134,101, a decrease of 5,009 officers related to a year earlier or 3.6 percent. Police forces specifically depend on the information technology most especially on its capability to store, share and retrieve data with regards to their cases, suspects and criminals that they handle.
According to the report that was released in March from the Metropolitan Police Service that does something to lessen the worries, it affirms that its IT became older as time goes by and because of that the force necessarily need to purchase in the new technology. Several technology that they use to secure the previous Olympic Games was about 20 years older, it was according to the Met.
With a composite annual growth rate of eight percent within 2011 and 2015, a previous report by TechMarketView, a research company concluded that the police will be the fastest-growing subsector in the IT services market and in the United Kingdom public sector software. However, instead of any major new investment in ICT equipment it is down to raise spending on the outsourcing, said by Georgina O’Toole, director of TechMarketView.
The forces can secure IT costs without losing control over outsourcing or threatening their systems by means of underinvestment, stated by Jim Dignan, Ovum analyst. He added that the senseless that they still manage with so many systems is the approximately £1.2 billion IT expenditure within the police forces, shared services was not often happened and it is the major problem but it would take out costs and raise efficiency.
There are two forces that are utilizing shared services instead of outsourcing are Cheshire and Northamptonshire. The two forces are sharing procurement, finance and human resources software managing on a new It system configured and supplied by Capgemini. According to Karen Watkins, the director of corporate services for Cheshire Constabulary that if they outsource they might acquire what looks like a better saving in advance however once it’s gone, they don’t see any additional savings as they go to the private provider.
Her technique was to maintain the support services in-house, purchase of the latest technology and observe at sharing wider functions with other forces, Watkins explains. By around 38 percent, Cheshire and Northamptonshire forces stopped costs of transactional services and that involved the increase in the cost of technology for the two forces.
The forces are seeking for other regions that can join their Multi-force Shared Services framework and share the cost of the staff that executes the back-office work to reduce the costs. He says there is a deficiency of skills to use legacy systems as employees are beginning to retire and if these systems does not work anymore then there is no one to fix them, this is what occurred with RBS’s IT malfunction. Police forces will need to take an extreme approach if they are to luckily navigate this stage of the economy.
REFERENCES:
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2199652/analysis-police-forces-investigate-new-ict-strategies
http://dailymoneyinvesting.com/analysis-police-forces-investigate-new-ict-strategies/
http://ictprocurement.com/government/analysis-police-forces-investigate-new-ict-strategies.html
http://localuknews.co.uk/article/analysis-police-forces-investigate-new-ict-strategies
http://ipotpal.sylverstyle.com/%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BB/analysis-police-forces-investigate-new-ict-strategies/
