A KM force to be reckoned with

As a Northamptonshire police officer, Graham Cheeseman spent nearly 25 years in various operational roles. But following an incident that forced him away from the frontline, he dedicated his last three years of service to the world of knowledge and information management. Here, he talks about implementing a content-management system at Northamptonshire Police. He has since retired from the Police service and moved to Cumbria.

I am not an IT professional, but I strongly believe that everything a public-sector organisation does, including every penny it spends, must be aimed at improving its service to the public. Therefore, in the case of a police force, it is the operational officers that need access to the very best information possible. Though not unique, a police force is unusual in that it is the people involved in the very actions that define policing (and often the least experienced) who tend to make critical decisions. Given this, it only seems fair they should have quick and easy access to information that will help them do their jobs. In my experience, I have found that creating a content-management system (CMS) for the police in Northamptonshire has been of great benefit.

The CMS issues highlighted below have all been addressed and, for the most part, resolved within Northamptonshire Police. Had they been foreseen and catered to at an earlier point, I’m sure the organisation would have saved time and money. In this article, I’ve pointed out some of the problems we experienced and which other organisations are likely to face during the implementation of their own CMS.

How we started

In the summer of 2000, in the wake of an incident that removed me from frontline duties, I was asked to explore the concept of knowledge management (KM), how it could benefit the police department and how to implement such a programme within the organisation. This was an immense challenge for me, as my background was almost entirely operational and what technical skills I possessed were largely self-taught. However, I was keen on the use of IT and a well-known critic of how long it was taking the police service as a whole, and my force in particular, to move into the information age. Knowledge management was viewed by the majority of the organisation with some scepticism, IT with suspicion and the creation of a Knowledge-Management Unit (KMU) with puzzlement.

Even with my limited knowledge, it didn’t take long for me to see that in order to institute a modern knowledge-management programme, we would need a reliable and efficient way to deliver it.

At this time, an e-mail system was still approximately six months away from being installed, though some, including me, doubted it would ever arrive. It had been “on order” for some considerable time, but policy and conditions of use had not been considered. Producing and administering these important issues became an ever-increasing part of the newly formed KMU’s role. Moreover, there was very little understanding or perceived need for any form of intranet or round-the-clock access to anything but hard, operational information, such as the Police National Computer and Local Intelligence. There had been a minority of people asking for more access to background or managerial-type information for operational officers, but the response from decision-makers had been minimal and slow, mostly, I believe, because of a lack of understanding of what was available, and the possible cost. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the number of desktop computers per member of staff was low and the number available to operational officers outside of office hours was even lower. Once again, this was largely down to budget.

A good example of the archaic state of our systems was our internal registry. Registry was where all written communications to the Force arrived and was sorted. It served as the library for all correspondence, circulars and official papers. Although not used in an immediate operational sense, the registry was nevertheless vital for planning and operational research. Yet it was a totally paper-based system that had been copied from the RAF just after the Second World War. Several efforts had been made to modify it, but all had been abandoned before being completed. The project therefore remained in the ‘too hard’ tray, and we were stuck with a cumbersome, slow and inaccurate system. Although it acted as the force’s knowledge repository and corporate memory, in reality, it was only available to a few people and many were not even aware of its existence. In my 25 years of operational service, I referred to it only a few times.

There were valid reasons for the shortages we were experiencing with computers, but delays in the introduction of an e-mail system, caused by budgetary and technical reasons that were never fully explained let alone understood, were beginning to cause frustration. The situation had deteriorated to the point where several operational areas began taking the matter into their own hands, introducing their own e-mail services with the help of outside service providers, despite the obvious security risks and associated costs. Several divisions had even started hosting their own websites. Senior management was aware of the situation, and by and large encouraged it on the grounds that a short-term fix was required. It was obvious the need to implement a force-wide system was urgent.

The argument

In the police service and the public sector, resources are often scarce. Funds that are available are normally allocated directly to service delivery, often to avert some operational crisis. It takes a powerful argument to convince operational commanders to divert some of those resources in order to be more effective in the future.

Traditionally, Northamptonshire Police had invested in people, not technology. As a result, there was a lot of ground to make up in a very short time. We were very fortunate to have a very high calibre of dedicated staff throughout the organisation who had the vision to support a KM project. It was against this background that I began to take a look at what other police forces were doing in the KM field. I discovered it turned out to be very little, although many expressed interest in the project I had undertaken. During my first six months investigating future KM strategies, I visited a number of other police forces and organisations and met with numerous vendors of IT solutions who appeared to offer packaged KM and CMS solutions.

It soon became clear that before we even started to take a serious look at KM as a governing principle, we would need a stable internal communications platform. This included not just e-mail, but an effective intranet that people would be comfortable using. And while e-mail was purportedly on the way, there was no firm date for launching an intranet. The idea had been discussed by senior management and an intranet officer recruited by the IT department some six months earlier, but there had been no measurable progress. The organisation as a whole, particularly the operational arm, had not been consulted in any way as regards the use of IT in this way.

In order to speed the process up, the aforementioned KMU was set up by the corporate development department. I led the team, which consisted of a police officer, a member of the information systems and technology (IST) department, the aforementioned intranet officer (who at that time still answered to the IST department and was responsible for the technical side) and a member of support staff hired for the task of maintaining and managing the intranet. This staff member later became our de facto content manager – a job she continued to do even after I left the organisation in June 2003. The crucial aspect of this unit was that it was operationally controlled and, in theory, aimed solely at the operational side of the organisation under the control and guidance of the head of the corporate development department. This was important both to ensure its relevance to operational officers and maintain its credibility as a useful tool.

Although we had reached this stage, we had still made a few mistakes that would cost us dearly in the future, particularly in respect to e-mail. I think it only fair to point out that, in the past, the IST department had received very little direction from the organisation about how it intended to use the e-mail facility it had commissioned.

Very few resources were allocated to training staff in the revolutionary way we were planning to work. This was especially true in the case of the intranet. The result was that when e-mail and the intranet, ForceNet, finally came online the vast majority of staff did not know how to use it technically or operationally.

Many staff questioned the need for either of the new technologies, clearly indicating that the systems put them outside their comfort zones. This situation led to confusion and a significant number of cases of misuse; mostly accidental but some intentional. These included the circulation of varying degrees of inappropriate material, and the use of the e-mail system for outside business interests.

Issues

We had significantly overestimated the organisation’s IT skills and as a result the acceptance of these new systems was much slower than we had hoped.

The situation was made even more difficult because the force had finally launched its own website, which was owned and controlled by the media and public relations department. They were unable to help with the work necessary for the construction and launch of an intranet due to their own shortage of resources. Although relations between the KMU and the media and public-relations department was good at all times, information sharing was not always effective. This led to some embarrassing misunderstandings, which did not help our drive to make the intranet the main channel of communications. At this stage the situation was very political, and no one department had the skills, funding or will to run all of the new systems.

Despite more hardware becoming available for all staff, the early use of these new platforms was poor. This, I believe, was due to a lack of terminals for operational officers, poor level of training and the culture of an organisation that was traditionally resistant to change. Even though we had flagged the need for proper training very early in the project, the training department was unable to give it the priority it needed and badly under-resourced it.

Before the project had properly begun, we had identified three major hurdles.

Poor planning;
Poor training;
Cultural resistance.

We were frustrated because we had seen and spoken to other people that had experienced the same problems, but we had been unable to avoid them – despite the outstanding support of our senior management and the best efforts of the KMU. Looking back now, I think we were guilty of thinking the same problems would never happen to us.

ForceNet

A team of three launched our intranet, ForceNet. Although our police staff member was very well qualified technically, he had little or no knowledge of operational work. Conversely, both I and the other police officer on the team were very keen, experienced and enthusiastic web users, yet when it came to formal technical training, we were well behind. We had a lot to learn and little time to learn it. The organisation was very willing to help us to acquire these skills by way of courses and visits to events, but it was not nearly as willing to increase the number of staff for the KM unit. The unit needed extra staff because it had become the administrator of the e-mail policy, ForceNet controller and developer, and was also responsible for researching electronic-document-management product purchase and implementation – all from a portacabin in the car park.

It wasn’t long before we convinced the organisation we were in desperate need of more resources, which led to the recruitment of the aforementioned staff member, and the secondment of another police officer who ended up concentrating on electronic-document management exclusively. To this day I am not sure how we managed to swing more funding, but we did. I think persistence and evidence of the need won the day in the end.

It soon became clear that the size of ForceNet was far outpacing our predictions. We had built such a useful tool that its content was rising astronomically. Hits on various pages of the site, particularly the social ones, had increased. We had originally included a section called Life Style, which consisted of social pages such as notice boards and classified adverts in order to tempt people on to the intranet, but it worked so well that demand for more information to be made available on a whole host of operational areas as well as social areas came close to overwhelming the team. The conversion of the registry became a separate project, which I believe is still ongoing.

The need for an electronic content-management system, rather than a manual one became more and more apparent. But first we had to ask ourselves:

What exactly did we want it to do?
How much would it cost?
Which one would suit our needs?

We decided to employ a consultant to help us obtain the funds to purchase an appropriate system, by giving us the information we needed to put a viable business case together. This was pretty standard practice.

I had always been wary of consultants, but on this occasion I believe we employed a very capable person who clearly knew what they were talking about. The problem was that we didn’t really have a clear idea of what, as an organisation, we wanted or needed.

The look and feel that we currently had on ForceNet was pretty, but we had to admit it was clumsy, and had been designed with under half the content in mind. It clearly needed to be more streamlined in order to make it easier to use bearing in mind the limited level of IT skills of the majority of our workforce, together with the increasing amount of information becoming available on the system.

With some excellent work from our consultant, funding was agreed, subject to tendering rules, and we started looking at the marketplace. We spoke to other similar organisations and tried to get a feel for what we could afford. In the mean time our consultant was surveying the market for us in his own right, talking to our technical people and coming up with recommendations.

There are 43 Police Forces in the UK, and they have 43 ways of doing things. Although everyone I spoke too agreed that a good CMS was a very desirable thing to have, no one had actually bought one. It was at this stage that we hit what were to be the two biggest obstacles of the whole project. The first one was that what ever solution we looked at, our technical people dismissed or recommended against purchase. It became clear that they did not see the need to purchase a commercial CMS, as they thought they could develop their own that would be cheaper, and more tailored to our needs. I backed down and went along with this point of view. I believe this was a mistake. I really think they believed that they could do the necessary work themselves for less money. I also believe that they overestimated their own skills in this regard.

The second issue involved devolved authoring. This was the most unexpected and difficult problem to resolve. It boiled down to the fact that while everyone wanted the ability to publish on ForceNet, very few area commanders had the will, or the ability to provide the resources, or at least the correct resources. The KMU did not help matters by promising numerous launch dates on the advice of technical staff, and subsequently missing them all due to technical difficulties. The operational areas began to lose interest and the whole issue started to be sidelined. All of the delays we experienced were because of technical reasons. I can’t help but think that if I had not have caved in to pressure from the technical side, this would not have happened.

However, despite all of these problems, within two years Northamptonshire Police had designed and launched an intranet that was well up with the finest in the country. As I left the police force, responsibility for ForceNet was about to be moved across to our media and PR department, that also ran the internet site, funding had been agreed for a CMS to serve both the internet and ForceNet, and the whole shape of the KMU was developing as planned. When the level of investment is taken into consideration, this was no mean feat. As far as a proprietory CMS goes, if we had bought one when we wanted too, we could have halved the time needed to establish ForceNet.

If I was asked to do it again, there are four things that I would insist on:

Once the vision is agreed, only a change in operational need would be allowed to change it. Not the needs of the provider;
All parties should sign up to the project and agree their part;
A realistic picture of training needs should be obtained and acted on;
A clear chain of command should be established, and politics should not be allowed to intervene once the project gets underway.