British Transport Police: Public Servants Delivering Better Public Services
Public Servants Delivering Better Public Services – Applying Originality in IT Strategic Delivery
In these times of financial austerity public servants must apply originality in how they deliver public services to meet the challenges they face. Yet, it is also wrong to assume the public sector has not been prudent with the public purse over the past decade either.
Initiatives such as Gershon and CIPFA have subjected the public sector to greater accountability, focusing them on providing sound financial management and good governance by releasing resources to front line services. In some instances this has already resulted in raising productivity, accountability and giving value for money to the public through efficiency savings.
That said the public sector now faces different and tough spending choices, as Mervyn King, the Governor of The Bank of England, warned ‘The UK faces a sober decade ahead’. Previous spending and efficiency drives must now start to mature and come to fruition. Information Technology was a key deliverable in these efficiency choices and, arguably, will now assist those decisions makers in making the hard-hitting choices they once again face. But what is important is that choices made must be the right ones, in the right areas, in the right order and the public sector must continue to deliver high quality and cost effective public services.
As the national police force for the railways, British Transport Police is not immune from the looming spending cuts. One of the challenges Cliff Cunningham, Chief Technology Officer at The British Transport Police, has faced is how to ensure strategic investment decisions in IT infrastructure will deliver optimum efficiencies in this new austere climate.
Today the Force is reaping the rewards of shrewd technology investment having replaced its legacy IT Service Desk with a Business Processes Management (BPM) ITIL Service Management technology, provided by ICCM Solutions, in 2006.
They made a clear and long term strategic technology commitment to introduce a Service Management BPM tool which they identified as having applications beyond its use within a pure Service Management environment, such as considering inventive applications ranging from improving personnel productivity processes for timesheet management and expenses, through to any manual form where a workflow is associated with it.
Cunningham comments “Firstly, from a performance management and training perspective, I’ve been able to understand the discrepancies of why one individual can close and resolve a call in 20 minutes versus another individual, who may take up to an hour for a similar incident. By identifying these performance trends I can allocate training resources in the most productive manner to remove this type of identified bottleneck.
“Secondly, and more importantly, through the virtualisation of my remote offices and desktops I can identify significant cost and efficiency savings by reducing the amount of unproductive travelling time between locations. This will improve my staff productivity overnight and increase my ability to support the business.
“There is no such thing as a one size fits all” states Cunningham when examining the cultural challenges of implementing a Service Management Solution. “When we were looking at an ITSM strategy we knew we had to be conscious of, and conform to a highly structured, ranked based organisation. The task ahead of us was to get senior management buy-in and to share with them our vision of what a Service Management strategy would deliver to the Force. We knew we had to demonstrate clear results that could be felt beyond the IT team and into the business.”
British Transport Police handle in excess of 2,000 Service Desk calls per month, supporting 7 geographical regions, 145 individual sites and 5,000 employees via its central IT base in North London. One of the ways ICCM’s e-Service Desk has helped to improve efficiency, productivity and communication is through enhancing cooperation and collaboration across locations. British Transport Police were previously using an Access database as a method of managing their Service Desk and the new IT Service Management tool allows them to edit a process module and change the workflow of the system to suit the Forces unique requirements.
Cunningham goes on to explain, “We tackled our uniqueness head on and undertook an ‘adopt and adapt’ approach, only achievable due to the flexibility of the business process nature of the ICCM Service Management software. This allowed us to learn, modify and model as we educated ourselves and the rest of the organisation. We took the initial decision to implement a relatively straight forward business process project that would have high impact results on the business as our first project. Once we were successful at this, we added more complex activities that addressed our pain points and took ‘head on’ the complexity of Incident Service Management.”
Other improvements the Force has witnessed include personnel ‘Case Management’ records within HR, CCTV officer request for footage retrieval, management and delivery, through to compliance with legislation relating to data stored on criminal records called ‘Review, Retain or Delete’.
These applications have produced cost and efficiency savings by streamlining these business processes within the Force. For example in the request for CCTV footage, an expensive and highly skilled front line police resource was once required to request footage, process the request, own it, present the information as part of a criminal case, and prepare images for court use and return them. This process can now be administered, via a BPM tracking process provided by ICCM Solutions, via an automated method owned by a less expensive back office administration staff member – releasing the frontline officer, who still retains full control and management of the CCTV request process.
Cunningham goes on to assert, “While we’ve yet to achieve everything we set out to establish since we set ourselves on an ITIL Service Management course, we’ve still achieved a great deal. An organisation like ours is an ‘oil tanker’ and does not turn very fast, therefore it’s critically important to educate and bring people with us.
“So our approach of adopt and adapt suits us extremely well. We’ve made significant inroads in changing our Service Management culture and introduced a number of corporate initiatives such as an IT asset class service level agreement strategy, built a knowledge base repository and provided a Configuration Management Database to the organisation.
“Ironically an interesting challenge I face as an IT manager is not that we’re limited by the technology we use, but often constrained by the delays in establishing an agreed business process first”.
Cunningham concludes, “Every organisation has its own political challenges and these have to be understood by both IT and the business. People in my situation have to really understand this. By investing in an ITSM model based on a BPM architecture you really have to believe that what you’re doing is right for your organisation, and have the ability to see the bigger picture if you want to reap the rewards.
“It’s an iterative process so the team, and by that I do mean IT and the business, must identify the joint issues together, understand how to overcome these, and plan what we jointly know to be right. It’s simple, we need to see, think, do and improve – everything a Service Management solution is about.”
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About The British Transport Police:
British Transport Police is the specialist, national police service for Britain’s railways. BTP deals with major and minor crime, disorder and incidents, and covers the rail system in England, Wales and Scotland, including London Underground, Docklands Light Railway, the Glasgow Subway and the Midland Metro and Croydon Tramlink systems. Its 2,914 police officers, 322 Police Community Support Officers, 190 Special Constables and 1,316 support staff are recruited and trained like those of local forces and have the same powers.
About ICCM Solutions
One of the overriding directives of ICCM Solutions is the simplification of complexity in Service Management environments. Founded in 1998 ICCM provides a global client base with sophisticated ITIL aligned Service Management Solutions built on Business Process Management (BPM) Architecture, from Metastorm BPM®.
The BPM platform provides ICCM clients the opportunities to implement and deliver successful technology strategies to ensure the collaboration between the business and IT – ultimately reaping the rewards of business innovation and competitive advantage.
ICCM’s software allows organisations to support and drive best practice, via a turnkey technology, and is available as a ‘Commercial off the Shelf’ Solution.
ICCM Solutions was named a Gartner ‘Cool’ Vendor in 2010.
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Police Cuts: The Facts (source BBC 26th October 2010)
- 20% cut in Home Office funding
- But more money expected to be raised as part of council tax “policing precept”
- So cuts for some forces may be as low as 14%
- No official figures published on job losses
- Police Federation claimed 40,000 jobs would go if cut was 25%
- HMIC said 12% cut achievable – but anything more would affect frontline