A police force wanted to understand the extent of their data quality issues experienced by staff and deliver recommendations for improving data quality. They also wanted support on their second organisation priority, which was to review the current data and analytics platform and provide a strategy for change that would support the police force on their data-driven transformation journey.

The police force also wanted to increase operational efficiencies through analytics and data science. Issues with data quality were felt to be pervasive across the organisation.

The technical requirements were:

  • A data platform that will allow for the development of a data quality scorecard that can be shared throughout the organisation.
  • Provide external and partner reporting.
  • The ability to assess data quality and define quality measures.
  • Enable self-service BI.
  • Real-time reporting without impacting the performance of operational systems.
  • The data and analytics platform should support the inter-agency sharing of data.

A risual Enterprise Architect conducted a Data and Analytics Strategy to outline a vision for strategic change within the police force, putting in place a framework that will:

  • Improve data quality.
  • Connect staff with data.
  • Move the force further towards becoming an intelligence data-driven organisation.

In the first stage, a data maturity assessment was carried out and then a review of the data quality and the source systems. The output from the assessment workshop included a Vision and Scoping report and recommendations that included upstream strategies to address data quality issues at the point of data entry, with some downstream strategies to improve data quality and data maturity across the organisation This included data cleansing metrics and Master Data Management.

A target architecture was also proposed with a strategy roadmap defining goals for year 1 through to year 3.

Following the Assessment and Strategy engagement, the Head of Information Management and Governance at the police force worked with the IT team and organisation stakeholders to build a business case to start the journey for the force to improve their data quality. Options under consideration included using the public cloud services and potential replacement of legacy databases that were hindering the objective to have golden nominals.

This Vision report provided the police force with a clear set of goals and objectives to achieve the organisation and technical requirements.

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