You are in:
Essex Police upgrade its internal database with help from Open Text
With a need to more efficiently and effectively search its internal databases for crime figures, hotspots, and any information that could help improve crime reduction initiatives, Essex Police has turned to Open Text’s Livelink Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Business Intelligence (BI) solution.
Essex Police wanted to reduce the time it took officers and others in the force to search for, identify, and access critical information. The force wanted a solution that would allow them to query and report centrally on data from its Crime Recording System.
Essex Police was already deploying an Open Text Livelink ECM BI solution, including BI Administration and BI Query. However, their needs had developed beyond the capabilities of the existing solution, which didn’t allow for the data to be managed centrally. The force’s critical information was dispersed across a number of shared servers and split into different data levels. This meant that updates to the system had to be carried out on each individual server, which resulted in officers spending vital man-hours managing the system instead of focusing on core policing duties.
Essex Police originally implemented Open Text’s BI Suite in 2004 and started using the BI Query tool to search and report on data from its Crime Recording System. Following this initial implementation, they soon realised the potential of the solution and started to create data models for other systems, allowing them to gather management information and provide data quality checks across systems.
Following discussions with Open Text, and then a series of demonstrations and evaluations, Essex Police decided to upgrade to the latest version of Open Text Livelink ECM BI Suite.
Sarah Rundell, IT – Application Administrator, Essex Police, commented, “Analysts constantly use BI Query as a method to interrogate the different information systems that exist in the force. It allows us to ask questions of the system in a way that cannot be asked through the normal search parameters in the individual systems. It gives us the ability to search and retrieve any combination of data fields from within the systems and extract the answers to a common platform, such as Excel, for further manipulation, and/or import to other analysis programs such as mapping or i2.”
The force has already found that gathering detailed information via BI is much easier, quicker, and more efficient than trying to extract it from core systems. This has allowed for quick and effective export to other systems, thus freeing up analyst time that can be better spent solving crimes as opposed to data extraction.
