A Case Study : Police National Computer (PNC)

How the implementation of Red Box helped PNC to develop an Operations Bridge

In the fight against crime, technology now plays a major role. For the last two decades the police service has relied on the extensive data and applications held on the Police National Computer.

Since 1974 the Hendon Data Centre has been home of the Police National Computer (PNC), providing essential information services to all UK police forces and other Government agencies including Customs and Excise, around the clock, 365 days a year. As well as housing the computer equipment, the Hendon Data Centre (HDC) provides all the support functions needed to ensure that the services are delivered in accordance with agreed quality standards as set out in the PNC Service Level Agreement.

Since its inception, the PNC has been continuously developed to ensure that the ever changing needs of police forces throughout the country are met by a high quality world class national information system. Key applications include Stolen Vehicles - the first application; Crime Pattern Analysis; Property; Fingerprints; and Criminal Names which has recently been replaced by the enhanced Phoenix application.

Says Richard Williams, Configuration Manager at PNC, "In 1990, the whole PNC application suite was redeveloped in the Natural fourth generation language from Software AG and we moved from Unisys hardware to Siemens Nixdorf." There are over 2,000 directly connected terminals into the system, with a further 5,000 other terminals connecting via 70 local force computers, and more than 900 local printers. All of these users access the system via the Police National Network which is managed by Mercury Communications.

The amount of data held is vast, with some 45 million vehicle records, 5.5 million names records and 4.25 million fingerprint records. Despite both the size and complexity of the system, the time taken to respond to enquiries is remarkably swift; in most cases the system responds in only a few seconds - despite the fact that in a single day PNC may deal with over 200,000 enquiries.

For PNC's customers such response times are critical. Consequently, the Hendon Data Centre (HDC) maintains a strong emphasis on Service Management: A Service Desk objective is to answer all telephone calls within 30 seconds and resolve 80 % of queries without referral elsewhere e.g. to PNC applications support teams.

With a constantly increasing level of PNC usage, the demands on the system are huge and HDC has recently merged the Service Desk, Computer Operations and Data Control together in an innovative new environment known as the Operations Bridge.

To help support the development of the 'bridge' concept, PNC embarked in 1994 on the implementation of a fully integrated Service Management solution - Red Box from Ultracomp.

In fact, as Richard explains, the initial brief was to implement a configuration management tool. "Our primary concern was to implement automated configuration management," he says. "But as we started looking at this area it became clear we actually needed to incorporate the full range of Service Management functionality into the project."

Prior to this, PNC had service management tools, encompassing help desk, problem management and change management but they were all stand alone systems. Indeed, with the exception of the mainframe based problem tracking application, the solutions being used were actually paper based - with change management being backed up onto a stand alone PC. "We needed an integrated system that would enable us to both track problems and changes and, critically, provide the support teams with access to ensure the help desk could pass problems out to the correct team," he comments.

Having rejected the option of extending the mainframe based problem tracking system with a bespoke development, PNC evaluated a range of client server based service management solutions. "We opted for Red Box rather than the other client server options because it was the only one evaluated that included integrated change management," he says.

Having implemented a building wide local area network (LAN) to facilitate the eventual system's access requirements of some 80 people, PNC opted first to focus on the configuration management element of the solution since that had been the primary drive for the project. "Managers were looking for more control and a better understanding of the assets that we hold," he explains. The move was timely since, as Richard explains, shortly after this a Home Office directive decreed that each Home Office department should maintain an asset register - which included the application software. "We were able to use the facilities within Red Box to meet that Home Office requirement," he says.

At the same time, PNC started to familiarise itself with the other applications within the Red Box system. The next module to go live - in August 1995 - was Change Management. With two or three changes per day to be handled, encompassing application and systems software changes as well as changes to the Police National Network, the previous paper based system made tracking changes somewhat time consuming. As he says, "If anyone wanted to know what was happening to a particular change they had to come and ask for a paper copy of the Request for Change. Now, all the support teams have the change system on their desktops so they can look themselves." He adds, "There has been a clear benefit: we hold more information now and it is more visible across all the support teams within PNC."

The next phase of the implementation was the help desk module which went live in mid 1996. "We were having some problems with the help desk logs," he says. "Now, with Red Box, we have a far more reliable recording mechanism." Indeed, the primary aim of the help desk implementation was to significantly enhance the level of recording of incidents; a critical factor with between 100 and 180 calls being received by the PNC Service Desk daily.

"The initial benefit is better tracking of incidents and the ability to spot trends," he says. "The analysis of trends in hardware failures and, specifically, network failures enable us to anticipate future problems proactively."

The system has also been rolled out to the support teams. "Because we already had the messaging system for change management, which alerts people to the need to carry out specific changes to the system, the roll out of the help desk to the support teams was relatively straightforward," Richard explains. "It effectively uses the same approach to alert people to the need to take action on a particular incident."

Richard believes the implementation of the Red Box help desk module will significantly speed up the overall level of incident resolution. Prior to the Red Box implementation, if an emergency incident occurred, the help desk staff logged it onto the problem tracking system and then telephoned the support team who immediately picked up that problem log.

With Red Box, while high priority incidents like this will still gain immediate attention, it is the lower priority incidents that will be picked up more quickly with the integrated messaging function alerting people more rapidly of problems to be tackled. "In this area, incidents will get turned around more quickly and more consistently," he maintains.

Additionally, Richard foresees clear opportunities for a more proactive approach to service management through the use of the system to track trends. "We do have problems with the network periodically," he says. "And we hope to be more proactive when we start detecting and analysing which will enable us to inform the users of potential performance issues."

One of the most difficult problems for PNC staff is the floating user population. In addition to the 2,000 directly connected terminals, anyone with the correct authorisation within a police force can access the PNC via their local force computer.

Additionally, since the Hendon Data Centre is primarily responsible only for managing the delivery of the PNC service to its customers it has no control over training programmes - a role which is handled by National Police Training (NPT). However, as Richard says, "If we can spot trends in user problems in specific areas - and the Red Box system gives us the potential to do this - we can feed the relevant information out to the NPT who can take the necessary action or we can pass it on to the individual forces as appropriate."

Having rolled out the help desk module, the PNC Directorate now intends to revisit the initial implementation of the configuration management database. He says, "The initial aim of that project was to get information about our core business assets. In fact, it will increasingly be used for controlling non core areas such as PCs, network connections; and we will be looking to increase the amount and value of information we hold in order to deliver business advantage." Adding, "Keeping all of this information in one place will provide a clear benefit."

At the same time, PNC staff will be implementing the final element of Red Box, namely problem management. "Being able to combine problem and change management will be a benefit. Although it happens rarely, with two separate systems there is always a danger of things being overlooked. Also, having to input the data into two separate systems doubles the workload."

By mid 1997, the PNC Directorate expects to have achieved the full implementation of the Red Box Service Management solution. "We are already able to provide clearer reports to management about system changes and our asset base. Once an integrated system is implemented I expect to see a more consistent approach to both assessing problems and implementing the changes to resolve those problems," he concludes.

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