Business case for corporate data warehousing

Report: 10
Date: 17 November 2005
By: Commissioner

Summary

The information held by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is not easily accessible. This is a key issue identified by the Bichard Inquiry, which the IMPACT programme is aiming to address through national developments to support information sharing and access.

This business case addresses the requirement for the MPS to meet its obligations to the national IMPACT programme. The MPS is required to comply with the IMPACT programme, which has been mandated by Parliament through the Codes of Practice for the Management of Police Information. It also addresses requirements articulated by the corporate strategy concerning information and intelligence.

The development of a data warehouse, which collates information from legacy systems to provide a single point of search is considered the most efficient solution to meet the identified business requirements. The total development cost for corporate data warehousing over three years is £17,018,179. This includes the requisite hardware, software and specialist development resources, but also the costs for MPS resources that will be providing the project management, business change and training support.

While requiring significant investment, data warehousing provides the MPS with the potential to realise capital and revenue savings (£2,500,000) and non-cashable opportunity savings (£15,320,842). The total capital, revenue and opportunity saving are estimated to be in the region of £17,820,842, compared to the total capital and revenue investment for the project of £17,018,179. The intelligence review in the MPS would seek to realise a number of the opportunity savings by establishing processes and standards for information management, thereby ensuring any searchable data warehouse is most effectively utilised in practice.

A. Recommendation

That

1. Members support investment from 2006-2009 in the development of data warehousing to improve internal access to information and facilitate compliance with the IMPACT programme, responsible for implementation of a number of recommendations from the Bichard Inquiry.

B. Supporting information

Background

1. The information held by the MPS is not easily accessible, it is frequently held in disparate systems that are not always easy to use and take significant time to be trained on. This impacts on users’ ability to locate, access and share information.

2. Bichard identified information access and sharing as a crucial factor in his inquiry post the Soham investigation. The IMPACT programme has been charged with leading on a number of the recommendations associated with the Inquiry, although “IMPACT is about more than simply…Bichard.... What Bichard found….was not the problem, but the symptoms of the problem. That the information about Huntley failed to reach those who could have acted on it to prevent the murder of two young girls was not an aberration: a one-off chance event. It was an inevitable consequence of endemic deficiencies in the police service’s ability to manage, share and link effectively the vast quantities of information in its possession. Those deficiencies continue to encumber and constrain police capabilities across the whole range of its work: at the local, regional and national level and in relation to all forms of serious crime (IMPACT Executive Summary Business Case September 2005).

3. This business case addresses the requirement for the MPS to meet its obligations to the national IMPACT programme. The MPS is required to comply with the IMPACT programme, which has been mandated by Parliament through the Codes of Practice for the Management of Police Information. It also addresses requirements articulated by the corporate strategy concerning information quality, system interoperability and intelligence development.

Table 1: Summary of business requirement and strategic context that informs the development of data warehousing

4. The development of a data warehouse, which collates information from legacy systems to provide a single point of search, is considered the most efficient option by the Directorate of Information (DoI) to meet the business requirements described above.

5. It is proposed that the systems included in the data warehouse must be those that hold data required by the IMPACT programme. The warehouse will include a data extraction tool to allow data sharing with other systems, including those in development by the IMPACT programme. MPS users have provided other data systems that they would gain benefit from if information could be searched from a single point. Ten years of data will be stored, with data updated every 24 hours to users. It is proposed the system will operate with 30,000 end users, therefore being an enterprise level application. This describes a system with greater than 1,500 users. Above this user threshold the number of users no longer becomes a significant driver of costs, compared to the investment required in hardware to support the application.

Figure 1: The potential strategic development for data warehousing to further support systems interoperability. (see supporting material)

6. The recommended option from the DoI is that the current Integrated Information Platform (IIP) be developed to warehouse data for the MPS. This will initiate a corporate approach to data warehousing that will consolidate existing Information Technology (IT) projects and provide a strategic direction to the Integrated Information Platform in which significant investment has been made over the past two years.

Summary of benefits for data warehousing

Initial benefits review based IIP pilot

8. A number of benefits have been drawn from the pilot of IIP, which include easily understood presentation of search results; improved access to information; the speed at which searches can be made using the system; and increased ability to search more frequently thereby ensuring information is current.

More officers and staff accessing information without significant requirement for abstraction for training

9. The data warehouse aims to deliver a single point of search that would only require a few hours computer based training. The projected cost saving from a reduction in staff abstraction for training 30,000 users estimated at £5.4 million is based on saving a minimum of 8hrs training per annum.

Reduction in re-keying information from one system to another

10. The data warehouse would be the single interface to enable users to search a range of system’s information, removing the need to re-key information stored in one system to another, as frequently happens with the current MPS intelligence system to facilitate ease of searching.

Quicker access by searching from just a single point

11. The data warehouse will provide information from a single search. Based on indications from the IIP the business benefits team within the DoI have estimated that a single point of search will save 57,500 hours leading to efficiency savings in excess of £8.7 million.

Access to more diverse information than is currently available

12. By improving access to information the data warehouse will offer officers and staff with confidence that they have been provided with everything the MPS knows about a potential suspect.

Enhanced prevention and dedication of corrupt usage

13. The system proposed would provide a single place where all of an officer’s activity, including those in this system itself, could be logged for later access.

Lower costs for future developments

14. The solution proposed here could save up to 50% of future project spend by providing a single system for searching information. For example, of the total spend to date on MetMIS (approximately £1.4 million) £700k would have been saved through the use of a Corporate Data Warehouse. Similarly the MPS spent over £1 million on the CRIS system to enhance the searching capability, which in the future could be avoided.

Enables the MPS to meet IMPACT requirements

15. The solution will enable the MPS to respond to the other demands to efficiently extract and share information to comply with both regional and national demands.

Summary of risks associated with developing data warehousing

Meeting IMPACT requirements

16. The development of a data warehouse capacity is a prerequisite for the MPS to meet regional information sharing requirements currently being demanded by the IMPACT programme (through the Cross Regional Information Sharing Platform – CRISP). Not complying with IMPACT increases the risk of information not being shared to inform part of an overall intelligence picture to inform decision-making. The Bichard Recommendations aimed to address this risk by emphasising the importance of access to information. The Home Office has driven both the Bichard Inquiry and the IMPACT programme and the Code of Practice for the Management of Police Information has been mandated by Parliament. The impact of poor information exchange and management both on public safety and force procedures have been demonstrated by the Soham murders and the events that ensued following the investigation.

Project delivery

17. The current projects that aim to provide a data warehousing solution in the MPS have been costly and struggled in terms of delivering to the user community for a number of reasons. It is crucial that any investment in corporate data warehousing be matched by appropriate prioritisation of the projects by the business and within the DoI.

Data quality

18. The current business case does not scope options for improving data quality as part of developing the data warehouse capacity. It is acknowledged that the value of the data extracted from a corporate data warehouse will depend on its quality. Enhancing the data warehouse in the future will allow for data quality issues to be addressed through data warehousing (see Figure 1). Information Management Group have acknowledged that a corporate data warehouse may offer some benefits by highlighting more clearly systems where data quality issues impact on delivery and offering a single location where data quality issues can be addressed.

Volume of information

19. The proposed system will hold vast volumes of information, which if non-specific searches are conducted could result in unmanageable amounts of information being provided. Current evidence from the IIP pilot suggest users do not consider the information returned from searches to be problematic, however the pilot system only holds limited amounts of data therefore mitigating action may be required to minimise this risk, to include influencing the search facility, providing clear business rules for use and appropriate training and support for users.

Controlling changes in the MPS host systems

20. A corporate approach to data warehousing brings with it a requirement to oversee changes to the host systems, as this will impact on data extraction from the legacy systems to the data warehouse. This will require governance over agreed changes in data collation and system configuration, which requires a more systematic overview of legacy systems than is currently operated within the MPS.

C. Race and equality impact

There are no race and equality issues associated with this proposal.

D. Financial implications

1. The cost estimates cover all anticipated spend throughout the duration of the project. This includes the requisite hardware, software and specialist development resources, but also the costs for MPS resources that will be providing the project management, business change and training support for the initiative. It also includes a contingency provision of £1.25M Capital. The estimate presented the maximum anticipated cost at the current stage of scoping the project. There may be opportunities to reduce cost through the negotiation of contracts for hardware and technical resources from suppliers.

2. The costs are based on two planning assumptions:

• The capital investment in hardware is a dependency for the start of the project, because the hardware will provide the infrastructure on which to develop the system.
• Phasing development over 3 years is the most efficient model, in light of the relatively expensive development phase and the lower cost associated with a support environment.

Table 2: Summary of estimated project costs for delivering corporate data warehousing

3. While requiring significant investment, data warehousing provides the MPS with the potential to realise a number of opportunity savings principally focussed around staff time and rationalising investment required to support the system infrastructure of the MPS. Table 3 describes the potential capital and revenue savings (£2,500,000) and non cashable opportunity savings (£15,320,842) associated with corporate data warehousing as being in the region of £17,820,842, compared to the total capital and revenue investment for the project of £17,018,179. The intelligence review in the MPS would seek to realise a number of the opportunity savings by establishing processes and standards for information management, thereby ensuring any searchable data warehouse is most effectively utilised in practice.

Table 3: Investment compared to estimated, capital, revenue and opportunity saving resulting from investment in CDW

E. Background papers

• Business case for the development of an MPS Data Warehouse supporting the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Bichard Enquiry (Recommendations 1 and 2)
• Detailed cost breakdown to support development of Corporate Data Warehouse

F. Contact details

Report author: Dr Nina Cope.

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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