Met Police keen on integration

The Metropolitan Police plans to save £18m through the introduction of its Integration Hub (I-Hub) application development infrastructure.

Due to complete testing at the end of this month, I-Hub will save money by speeding up the deployment of new information-sharing applications by up to three months and will slash the time spent by officers inputting information into databases, claims the Met.

Combining Oracle and SQL databases with application infrastructure technology from BEA Systems, I-Hub will standardise new applications in order to incorporate them into the its Enterprise Application Platform, so that police can get a 'single view' of information on criminals and workflow.

The Met estimates that the new tools will bring 27 per cent savings on support and maintenance costs, as well as a reduction in application development time.

The police force is using the I-Hub system to deploy its new MetDuties rostering system, which helps automate which jobs and calls individual officers respond to by matching skills to tasks.

"If a firearms certificate runs out you don't want to deploy the wrong person to the incident - MetDuties helps us deploy the right officer to the job," said Kevin Wyeth, head of component integration and configuration at the Met's directorate of information.

The Met will also use I-Hub to develop its soon-to-launch MetFor forensics applications.

The force is working with the Police Information Technology Organisation to integrate the system with other police forces to ensure information sharing.

"It's important to share information across the police," said Wyeth. "If crime is happening in Scotland and it's coming our way we need to know it is coming."

A single sign-on system will also reduce the need for police officers to re-input data into different systems and will improve data quality, bringing time savings that police can spend investigating crimes, said Wyeth.

"We want to catch more criminals and integration of data is a way we can achieve this," he added.

"If I can save two-thirds of officers from having to re-key information, with a force of 24,000 people, then we can make significant time savings."