14 DAY TRIAL // Victoria Police is again seeking a major overhaul of its IT department after the Blue Paper report revealed by Chief Commissioner Ken Lay points to outdated software and old hardware that dramatically affects productivity and causes serious issues within the local departments.
According to the report, police investigators have no other option than to spend almost half of their shifts working on computers, as they struggle to deal with a number of issues and cope with outdated software.
Transferring data between departments and sending information from one system to another takes too much time, the report states, with the legacy Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) record management database, and the Interpose database for intelligence cited as two of the solutions that are eating up too much of their work time.
“There are multiple applications that do not share information, are not mobile, do not contain an adequate security or audit function and do not support organisation-wide, end- to-end business processes. These multiple databases, many of which are unsupported or have single points of failure, require duplication of information and manual data entry,” local officials have said.
The high costs of a potential upgrade to a newer operating system are considered to be the main issue right now, with people close to the matter saying that in some cases, officers are even forced to take documents at home because the applications currently being used by the local departments do not have support for newer formats.
Windows XP computers owned by the Victoria Police are projected to be upgraded to a newer OS version by the end of the year, but it's not yet clear whether this migration process would be completed in time or not.
“The Victoria Police computer network still uses Windows XP, which has been superseded by three newer operating systems. Many police encounter difficulty in opening documents created using newer programs and resort to taking the documents home to read, print or convert to a usable format. The operating system will be upgraded by the end of 2014, for the first time in many years,” the report states.
Local authorities have already created an upgrade plan that would allow the Victoria Police to “become a more connected, intelligence-led and evidence-based organization” by 2025, obviously with big budgets that would allow the acquisition of new software and hardware for increased productivity.
In the meantime, the Victoria Police is not alone in its quest to get rid of Windows XP, as 25 percent of the desktop computers worldwide are still running this unsupported OS version. Many large companies however are planning to upgrade to another platform by the end of the year as well.