Government Technology - Improving police service levels

Improving police service levels

Dyfed Powys Police has improved its Incident Management processes with the help of ICCM

As part of the ongoing drive to improve performance, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) recommended that all police forces should align their IT and service support with ITIL®. This created an immediate challenge for Dyfed Powys Police.

According to IT Service Desk Supervisor, Chris James: “Quite simply, our Incident Management solution at the time was not sufficiently robust or flexible to cope with the complex and specific demands of ITIL® implementation. So one of the first decisions we made was to invest in a new internal customer service and Helpdesk system.”

For the force, excellent Incident Management is an increasingly important priority, delivering the internal efficiency that enables it to meet the rising service level expectations of its workforce.

Challenges
Key challenges pre-implementation were:

Insufficient flexibility to implement ITIL®
Poor tracking of assets and Incident Management
Limited ability to interface with internal customers
Significant administrative burden distracting from front-line services
Transparent selection

As a public organisation, in procuring its new solution, Dyfed Powys Police needed to carry out an open and transparent tender process. A total of six organisations made bids for the business – with the ICCM solution coming out on top.

This was the e-Service Desk solution from ICCM which, according to Chris James “was particularly suited to our needs because the product was designed in alignment with the ITIL® framework. We recognised that this gives us the capability to build best practice into our implementation from the ground up. Just as important, ICCM came in at a highly competitive price.”

Diverse geographical spread
Covering the unitary authorities of Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Powys, the region’s communities are primarily rural with small centres of population, presenting a significant challenge to the Dyfed Powys Police objective of providing best value services.“This meant that when investigating the market place to find an appropriate solution, we had two main priorities in mind,” Chris James continues.

“First, it needed to be very competitive on price, underpinning our commitment to best value. And second, it would ideally enable us to implement the ITIL® framework from the ground up. Specifically, we were also looking for a highly-configurable solution – a major Configuration Management deficiency in our existing solution resulted in poor tracking of assets and a lack of information for Incident Management. We were determined that its replacement should be significantly stronger in this area.”

Dyfed Powys Police plan to create a solution with wide-ranging functionality, based around a fully featured customer management database. “The build is enormously simplified by the inbuilt feature-set that is an integral element of e-Service Desk,” Chris James continues. “It will enable us to build in our Incident Management processes and to introduce Change, Problem and Release Management too.”

Better customer service
Chris James is particularly excited by the potential of the Customer Portal Module, which he believes will drive an altogether better quality of customer service.

“We will be able to interface better and more efficiently with our internal customers. Linked into more effective Incident Management, this will help make us be more responsive and transparent, overcoming two of the main frustrations affecting our people.”

In fact, the force is looking forward to delivering a more complete service with more ‘right first time’ customer contacts. As Chris James says: “These are key performance criteria that really matter. Efficient customer management is therefore a critical priority for us that ICCM can help us deliver.”

Reduced administrative burden
Equally, Chris James expects e-Service Desk to help eradicate some of the paper based processes that have caused delay in servicing customer requests. As he says: “In conjunction with the Metastorm Business Process Management engine on which the solution runs, we expect to be able to create specially tailored processes to help us manage new starters, leavers and transferees. This will enable us to make better use of the resources that are available to us, and free up users from mundane administrative tasks.”

About ICCM
Extraordinary Service Desk Software created within the leading process improvement architecture. ICCM’s core objective is to provide revolutionary software and superior services to organisations aspiring to Best Practice Service Management. Rather than the legacy “application development” driven approach that many vendors in the market have adopted, ICCM’s forward-thinking approach blends their first-class Service Desk tool with the functionality of business technology in the form of Metastorm BPM™. This collaboration delivers unparalleled Service Management capabilities across all industries and business functions in almost every geographical region.

Summary
Company: Dyfed Powys Police
Location: Dyfed Powys
Employees: 2021
Business need: Improve service levels
Solution: e-Service Desk
Results:

Centralised Service Desk
Better Incident Management
Call Categorisation
Improved Quality of Customer Service

For more information
Web: www.iccm.co.uk
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Tel: +44 (0) 1666 828600