At the Board meeting held on 26 February 2019, and in the context of disclosure failings related to the Sean Graham Bookmakers atrocity, the Chief Constable highlighted to the Board that IT systems in the PSNI required upgrading, and that a business case had been submitted by the PSNI to DoJ during the previous year for funding. Can the Chief Constable provide an update in regards to this request for funding from the DoJ, and what progress has been made to address the deteriorating IT systems within PSNI?
The business case submitted to the Department of Justice, in July 2018, was in regard to additional police staff to support the disclosure process and not IT system’ related.
In respect of legacy disclosure IT systems, a project to migrate 2 legacy data sources to a new system, on our modern, secure & resilient Crime Ops IT platform is on schedule for completion by the 30 June 2019. Once migration has been completed, an assessment will be undertaken to assess the full capacity of the enhanced search function.
Two further IT systems have been assessed as having insufficient business continuity resilience. Work to address these concerns has now been completed.
An assessment of potential technical solutions to perform the back record conversion of papers and microfiche records has been commissioned. Research to date has failed to identify a suitable solution.