All of us have experienced information overload at some point. My writing this column creates more information for you to wade through, on top of the streaming news feeds, market reports, clippings monitoring competitors, mainstream news events, and facts and figures relating to one`s personal life, which we all need to read, and to respond to in some way. There`s no end of information, and the resultant administration required can sometimes reach torturous proportions.
Every arrest made needs to be documented, and depending on the nature of the arrest, it can involve up to 40 forms and take between two and eight hours to process.
Basheera Khan, UK correspondent, ITWeb
This admin - the acknowledgement of which is often accompanied by heaving sighs, eyes rolling heavenward, and the sensation of having one`s life blood slowly wrung out by the seemingly never-ending demands of a modern lifestyles - can literally be a matter of life-altering consequences.
Take for example, The Case of the Confounded Paperwork, which has been hounding Britain`s police service for some time now. The full extent of the damage has recently been determined by research conducted among hundreds of police officers, which found that most police officers spend about 17% of their time on patrol. The remainder of an average eight-hour shift is spent dealing with administration.
Responding to e-mail, filing crime reports across a variety of systems, transcribing recorded interviews, arranging an identity parade, responding to emergencies, assisting in manhunts or searches for missing persons; all these and more create such a monumental amount of administration to address that police officers have claimed it is preventing them from fulfilling their intended role in society.
Drowning in paperwork
It appears that the police service is in desperate need of business process re-engineering.
By all accounts, it appears that what the police service needs to overcome the admin blues is a completely overhauled approach to information management.
Every arrest made needs to be documented, and depending on the nature of the arrest, it can involve up to 40 forms and take between two and eight hours to process. If a solicitor, adult or another representative needs to be called, that can mean another hour`s wait before any progress can be made.
Though it sounds, and is, quite cumbersome, the reporting isn`t really the problem. It`s the short-sighted design of the data capture systems which is to blame, in my opinion. As police officers have bitterly complained, a busy late shift can mean an entire night inputting data, into electronic forms roughly 20 sheets long, which aren`t designed to replicate standard details across all sheets (which ironically enough, is the meaning of life for templates, I`m led to believe), and which offer no scope for reference information that can be sourced from a shared general database, such as grid references to addresses in relation to post codes. Information like that is used for statistical purposes, say the coppers, but it serves no useful purpose in their daily grind.
It doesn`t help that the daily grind currently also covers such dubious duties as looking after abandoned pets and helping hapless householders who have locked themselves out of their homes.
Realistic solutions
I believe the solution lies in a number of approaches, affecting both the organisation, and the individual police officers. For starters, none of the research makes it clear whether police officers are equipped with skills which would make dealing with information less painful; skills such as speed typing, or standardised training in time management. Treating the organisation would require significantly better design and implementation of data capture systems.
The state of the police force now is not dissimilar to that which many a multinational company found itself in several years ago, when the practise of housing information silos became a millstone around the neck, rather than the operational advantage it was intended to be. True success depended on the information being exchanged fluidly between all relevant parties, and of course, on rock solid document management.
These were - and are - among the tenets of enterprise resource planning (ERP), and although it can be argued that some companies still haven`t truly got ERP to work for them, the concept is sound. Of course, when it comes to spectacular failures of ERP implementations, sometimes, there`s just no accounting for sloppy strategising.
Negative citations aside, an enterprise-wide solution would definitely address the police service`s dilemma. Of course, some perspective is required when trying to devise realistic solutions to the problem. Anyone involved in the information industry might find it hard to feel sympathetic to those whose e-mail issues boil down to dealing with upwards of 50 messages when returning from a three or four day break away from the office. To be fair, not many information workers are duty bound to fight crime, but the contrast must be drawn.
Perhaps the ultimate solution lies in those to whom the police report, finding some room for compromise in the great information ecosystem which the administration of life as we know it has become. You could bet your bottom dollar that citizens would sooner see police officers voluntarily out on the streets, than unwillingly behind a terminal.
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