Since reform, Police Scotland now delivers all of the functions of a national force and ICT systems integration continues to implement and improve ICT services to support that delivery. One of these services is the collection, management and use of data to support operational policing and reporting. Police Scotland employs data analysts, scientists and statisticians in a teams across its estate tasked with using the available data to deliver analysis, dashboards and reports to Police Scotland and its external stakeholders, including the Scottish Government. Currently the data is available from a variety of sources, including a traditional data warehouse, functional reporting data sets and directly from operational systems. Access rights and software tools vary, by data source, by individual and by team.
Police Scotland intends to improve analytical capabilities to, in turn, improve operational policing and is developing an initiative to deliver:
“Rapid deployment of easy access to a single view of trusted, linked force-wide data”.
The preferred approach is to implement a virtual data warehouse and a data lake (repository of raw data) to facilitate:
1. Controlled access to all data in all sources in a single view
2. The extract of data from operational systems to the data lake
3. The application of quality controls and governance to import data from the data lake into the data warehouse.
At this stage the focus is on step 1.
We are seeking to procure the implementation of a suitable data virtualisation software solution into the Police Scotland in-house ICT environment to allow a single view of all available data to all authorised users on the following basis:
- Software licence(s) for a Data Virtualisation solution with annual support and maintenance services. Licences will be scalable but will be used by 200 users initially.
- Services to support the initial installation, configuration and integration of solution with Force Wide operational systems.
- Discretionary further services, to be quoted on a day rate basis
- Licences for different user types (example – read only, admin users etc.).
- Discretionary transition to cloud model during contract term. The solution shall be deployed, initially, on premise, but deployable, in part or in whole, on a private or public hosted cloud environment at a later date.
- Costs are expected to be provided within the commercial response for any licence transition and associated support and services for a potential move to a cloud based model within the contract term. This would not be expected as a complete re-licence exercise, more a transition.