Ontario city extends BI app to police services division

Tool expected to improve public safety by providing better crime tracking data

Business intelligence made the City of London more fiscally efficient. Now it hopes the software will make the Ontario city safer. The municipal government has used Cognos business intelligence (BI) solutions for three years to improve access to financial and operational performance data across most of its departments. It announced recently it is implementing BI in the police services division as well.

Systems administrator Brian Whitelaw says officials felt the solution played a role in other departments' improved efficiency and could now help the police bring better protection services to the community.

"We're developing a PowerPlay cube for (police services) that allows them to track crimes, statistical data for crimes, where the police are at the time, response times, and various other things," he says.

Public and private sector organizations are familiar with the traditional uses of BI in the financial and accounting reporting and management. They're finding that it can also be applied to the day-to-day operations of a department, providing clues to how those processes can be tightened, says Cognos director of public sector solutions Terence Atkinson.

Atkinson points to the City of Albuquerque, N.M., where the police department is using Cognos software to track crime statistics and broadcast them through an e-government site. Residents can find out what crimes are on the rise, which neighbourhoods are safest and other similar public safety issues, he says.

The London, U.K., fire department is also using the solution to get statistical information on where false alarms are most frequently coming from to better prepare the firefighters for dealing with those calls, Atkinson says.

"The value for them is that it increases their readiness and responsiveness for other fires and lowers their costs," he says.

BI solutions are fast becoming a critical performance management tool, Atkinson explains, by initially allowing better insight and transparency into the business. As better understanding and more historical information is gathered, historical trends and performance levels can be evaluated.

"Let's say that if you place a 911 call the average response time is nine minutes. How does that compare to the average for cities of our size?"

Whitelaw explains that London initally turned to the Cognos solution in an attempt to free its employees from having to rely on IT department-generated performance reports.

"Now they have reports that allow them to drill down and look at any detail they want," he says.

Cognos has done well, Atkinson says, because its solutions enable the kind of insight critical in limes of economic uncertainty. "I think we tend to underestimate the value that governments would place on efficiency and performance," he says. "But around the world governments are being called to task about how they're spending their money and how they need to be more efficient in how they deliver services to their constituents."

- ITBusiness.ca

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Feb 2003
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