Queensland Police looks for HR system refresh

Queensland Police has kicked off the first technology project aligned with an exhaustive restructure announced earlier this year.

In January, Queensland Police announced a department-wide reshuffle in response to an internal review of operations in August 2012. As part of this restructure, some 322 employees, 110 officers and 212 staff, are to be offered redundancies - an undisclosed number of them within information technology.

Queensland Police’s Information and Communications Technology division was renamed the Information Technology Division (ITD), with all IT positions across Queensland Police ‘central functioned’ to ITD as of January.

However, any major IT reforms have been put on hold until the Queensland Government responds to the whole-of-government State of IT audit report. That report was due to be released last year but was stalled. It is expected to be tabled in Parliament in the near future.

The Police service has moved on the first of these reforms this week, approaching the market for a new rostering system for officers to replace its “heavy reliance” on Microsoft Excel, an in-house I-TAS system and manual entry from rostering clerks.

The Police sought “innovative ideas” from suppliers for a rostering system that requires minimal technical or administrative effort, on a preferred framework of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with a browser-based user interface.

A more mobile force

The January review found many business processes within the Police Force "do not take into account technology improvements and assets/resources which may not be being deployed where they are most needed,” singling out the use of mobile services. 

“Queensland lags behind many other jurisdictions in terms of mobile data,” the review stated.

“There are significant productivity, officer safety and crime prevention/detection improvements that can be realised with appropriate technology support to frontline officers.”

As a result, QPS is planning a "mobile policing" model in higher density areas which will give officers mobile access to internal IT systems at every police station.

Queensland Police declined to comment for this story.