Constabulary lowers costs, increases public safety with enhanced collaboration

The Cambridgeshire Constabulary wanted to replace an outdated Lotus Notes environment and transform how the organisation worked. In 2012, the constabulary used Microsoft SharePoint 2013 to explore how it could better help its employees discover information, share documents, and organise data. As a result, the constabulary expects to lower costs, increase collaboration, and enhance public safety.

The Cambridgeshire Constabulary provides law enforcement and public safety services in Cambridgeshire. The constabulary’s 1,100 constables deliver neighbourhood policing services for 800,000 Cambridgeshire residents.

In response to a national government spending review, the constabulary will be required to trim £20 million from its budget by 2015. To help lower costs, it is evaluating new approaches to policing, such as working collaboratively and sharing operational data with neighbouring constabularies in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

For many years, the constabulary used Lotus Notes to develop in-house solutions that managed internal data, such as event orders, duty rosters, and other critical policing information. Cambridgeshire used Lotus Notes to manage databases of key criminal, public safety, and operational information, and according to government guidelines, it must maintain some databases for up to 25 years.

Over time, the Lotus Notes environment became expensive to maintain and difficult to interoperate with the constabulary’s updated IT infrastructure, which included Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and Microsoft Lync 2010. Constables and other employees could only search one Lotus Notes database at a time, and they often had to open more than a dozen databases before finding the information they needed.

The Cambridgeshire Constabulary needed to control costs, while creating more capacity to collaborate and share information. It wanted a technology that would work well with other critical programs, across organisational boundaries, and on multiple devices. “We needed to streamline and transform our organisation,” says Phil Silvester, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Strategy and Program Manager at Cambridgeshire Constabulary. “It was time to look at every process, every workflow, and make them more efficient.”

To find out about the solution and the benefits gained by Cambridgeshire Constabulary, please visit our case studies website here.