THE Police Service of Northern Ireland has appointed Civica Digital, a division within the Civica Group, to deliver the forces’s new data sharing platform for an initial five-year period.
The PSNI ran an extensive procurement exercise to find a partner to design, build, support and provide services for the future development of a robust criminal justice data sharing (CJDS) solution, which is due to go live in November 2019.
Civica has designed the new system to support information sharing between numerous sources, including PSNI’s case management systems, Causeway (the NI criminal justice data store) and the Police National Computer (PNC), joining together multiple pre-existing systems into a single streamlined integrated solution.
The new data-sharing platform should lead to a better structured and controlled information flow between the police, the Public Prosecution Service, prison and forensic science services, speeding up day-to-day processes and reducing errors.
The system also includes a set of operational management and self-monitoring tools which will allow PSNI to rapidly view, track and rectify issues as soon as they occur.
Information held on the data sharing platform can be shared out via the PNC, linking data with the wider UK and European police data sharing platforms in one seamless transaction.
Jeff McNamara, head of ICS at the PSNI, said: “This new platform will streamline our processes and systems and drive more efficiency, and it is crucial at a time when budgets are continuously stretched, demands are becoming more complex and public expectations are changing.”
Mark Owens, managing director at Civica Digital Ireland, added: “This contract builds on our long-term partnership with the police service and follows a large body of work we’ve delivered through programmes such as NI Direct. We see it is a further endorsement of our strong digital credentials and presence in the region.”
Civica Digital is a division of the Civica Group (www.civica.com), which supplies more than 3,000 major customers in 10 countries around the world.
