Met meets data demands
Lisa Kelly talks to the Met Police's Steve Farquharson about using information to help drive planning
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is the UK’s largest police force, covering a population of 7.2 million. All policing operations depend on effective management of information, says Steve Farquharson, group director, information management.
‘The MPS uses information for all the planning and decision-making processes you would expect in a public sector organisation of our size,’ he says.
‘Our remit is to reduce crime and the fear of crime in London, so we use information to drive investigations, plan for public order events, plan responses to critical incidents, and manage our resources and the services we deliver.’
Farquharson says the MPS’s strategy is to ensure it is able to exploit information to achieve the maximum impact.
‘We need to be able to share the information effectively and use it to support our decision-making,’ he says. ‘In essence we aim to make sure all our information is trusted, accessible and usable.’
But the most formidable task facing the MPS is persuading its 50,000 employees that information management is crucial to its success.
‘Our fundamental challenge, as with many other organisations, is to convince employees that information is a critical resource, and that managing information effectively is not bureaucracy, but an essential business activity to the delivery of effective policing,’ says Farquharson.
To exploit information effectively, and ensure that information management policies are adhered to, Farquharson says the right controls must be put in place.
‘Information needs to be secured appropriately, kept according to our business needs and be of good quality,’ he says.
The MPS has created a set of information management policies, including a quality assurance framework for the development and implementation of systems, and an awareness and compliance monitoring framework.
Farquharson acknowledges that while technology can help make the best use of data, an effective information management strategy must ensure a focus on employee buy-in.
‘While technology is a key enabler, we believe the key priority is to ensure we have a set of organisational processes and structures to deliver more effective information management – and that our people understand and take responsibility for the information they handle,’ he says.
A planned enabling technology for the MPS is a data warehouse, which will help manage and exploit data. It is being developed by service specialist Capgemini under the £350m, seven-year outsourcing contract signed in 2005.
Farquharson says that work will take place next year to migrate hardware running live applications from the current data centres to two new data centres.
‘Getting best value from all our data for tactical and strategic decision-making is of prime importance, and our development of a corporate data warehousing facility will be central to this,’ he says.
Dealing with rapidly growing data volumes is a problem facing all organisations, and one of the biggest contributors is email – an enabling tool that can prove a disability.
‘With more than 50,000 staff based in some 700 sites across London, communicating is a major challenge and the MPS is seeing a growth in the use of email and documents,’ says Farquharson.
‘To co-ordinate this growth we are implementing an electronic documents and records management solution, to help inform our future development of an enterprise content management (ECM) system.
‘We have to contend with managing legacy information on paper and in databases, and migrating a proportion of our paper-based information into the electronic world. We are working to develop an integrated ECM system that will manage this information across our estate.’
Despite these huge information management challenges, the MPS already has a number of successful projects under its belt. It has led the development of the National Police File Plan, which is central to migrating its emails and documents into a corporate structure.
The centralised electronic filing structure, built around the functions, activities and tasks the organisation carries out, is being introduced across the MPS in a phased approach.
‘Introducing the File Plan helps ensure the necessary information management rules and procedures are applied to protect our information according to its worth, supports consistency and standardisation across our information in all formats, helps minimise duplications of information and assists compliance with business needs, policy and legislation,’ says Farquharson.
Within its information management group, the MPS has developed a range of toolkits enabling the organisation to share essential information with other criminal justice agencies.
The MPS has also established a dedicated data management team which is developing and delivering a major programme of data quality improvements for the information it already holds – see key business processes link, below.
The organisation is one of the UK’s biggest recipients of Data Protection Act subject access enquiries – handling more than 80,000 each year.
Although the MPS faces unique challenges in information management, Farquharson says being able to share information more easily across organisations should be a common goal to all.
‘Technology can help us in these endeavours, but it cannot solve what is essentially a business issue,’ he says.
Steve Farquharson will be speaking at the Information Management Solutions (IMS) event which runs from 28 to 30 November, at the Grand Hall, Olympia, London. To save £15 on the door register now at