Case Studies

Public Sector

PND

The Police National Database (PND) is a centralised intelligence-sharing platform which receives inputs from UK police forces, as well as other related agencies. When the system came into existence in 2007 the first problem to overcome was that of how to get the data into it; data was held locally by individual forces across 200 operational systems, and in varying states and formats.

Datalynx undertook data analysis, data quality assessments, interface development and testing; and subsequently managed the implementation plan for all 52 law enforcement data providers. We developed bespoke software that could be used by all forces, and we provided technical assistance in developing interfaces for PND.

Such was our success in delivering this project that we were asked to provide other supplementary services such as quality assurance, policy writing and MI dashboards that are still being used today.

NDQIS

The National Data Quality Improvement Service (NDQIS) is a national system developed for the Police Service to improve the accuracy of Forces Crime data by updating relevant fields within the Forces’ RMS systems.  The central service utilises ‘natural language processing’ via well-established software tooling from Datactics.

This is an ongoing project Datalynx has been involved with since inception. We have provided the following services.

  • Design and build of the RMS Gateway Application which provides interoperability between local force record management systems and central NDQIS services

  • Roll-out and onboarding of the RMS Gateway to over 40 forces across England & Wales

  • Architecture service for NDQIS

  • Security Architecture service for AWS

LEDS

The National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP) is delivering a new integrated Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) hosted on secure AWS environments.

The services currently provided by the Police National Computer (PNC) will be replaced by LEDS. PNC Property the national system holding certain stolen and found property is one of the first services to be replaced.

This is a project Datalynx has been involved in since inception. We are providing the end-to-end data migration service including

  • Design, build, test of the data extract from SoftwareAG ADABAS running on Fujitsu BS2000 mainframe – Key Requirement for minimal impact and change on PNC

  • Configure, build, manage, and support for the Data Migration Environment in AWS

  • Design, build, test of the data migration service running in AWS

North Wales Police

North Wales Police (NWP) had several legacy systems holding information on crime, intelligence, custody, and child protection relating to the North Wales area. Along with most other forces in the UK they were seeking to rationalise their IT estate and consolidate their data into their single operational system Niche Records Management System (RMS).

We were asked to conduct an audit of the systems used by NWP. We analysed each system, providing a summary of the information held, the information retention requirements and a brief data migration impact assessment which included an assessment of the quality of the data. The report also contained recommendations for which systems to prioritise for data migration.

Subsequently we were requested to migrate data from three legacy systems, merging the data into NWP’s existing Niche RMS, the legacy systems were:

  • PCS2000 Custody

  • ABM Crime

  • ICRIS Intelligence

The source systems were Oracle 7, 8 & 10G databases and the target system was Microsoft SQLServer.

We were responsible for the delivery of the complete data migration lifecycle from project initiation to completion. Due to the sensitive nature of the data, the project was run entirely on-site in North Wales requiring our consultants to be on-site for the duration of the project. Our responsibilities included:

  • Undertaking the initial assessment and audit of NWP systems

  • Providing a data summary including retention requirements

  • Data Quality assessment

  • Developing the data migration strategy

  • Producing pre-migration impact assessments for each source system identified for migration

  • Creating the data mappings and agreeing with the business

  • Data cleansing including

    • 1.6 million addresses via the Blue8 Gazetteer

    • Person and address de-duplication

  • Developing extractions, transformations and load software components using LynxETL our proprietary data migration

  • Unit and integration testing and managing the UAT testing

  • Developing the cutover strategy and undertaking the live data migration

  • Management and coordination with the third-party suppliers / delivery partners