Accenture has been given $3.5 million and six months to build a proof-of-concept solution for NSW Police's future core policing system.
The computerised operational policing system (COPS) is integral to the force's everyday operations. It facilitates logging of criminal incidents, intelligence gathering, and the issuance of charges, among other things.
But the 23-year-old ADABAS/Natural application has over 5000 green screens that make it difficult to use and access real-time operational reports.
The police agency's long-running efforts to modernise COPS kicked off in force in 2013 with $44.8 million in funding from the state government.
It had previously decided to split up the design and build elements of the massive program to reduce risk and impact on the organisation.
It appointed Deloitte in 2014 to lead the first bundle of work, which produced "functional design on a logical level" for the new platform.
The force then went out to tender for a build partner in mid-2015.
Last week it handed Accenture $3.5 million to build it a proof-of-concept solution for what it is calling NewCOPS. The contract runs for six months.
NSW Police did not respond to request for comment.
The proof-of-concept will involve the replatforming of COPS' events, intelligence, and investigation case management subsystems. Other subsystems like infringements and warrants will remain on the mainframe for the time being and migrate to NewCOPS at a later date.
The force wants all of COPS eventually migrated to J2EE and HTML5 technology, and the legacy system decommissioned.
It has previously said NewCOPS can either be custom-built or leveraged from existing "police-specific solutions".
The proof-of-concept platform will need to offer faster and more efficient search, better navigation and data entry, more efficient workflow summaries, multimedia recording of incidents and information, support for mobile devices, and a community portal.
Accenture will also need to ensure its proposed solution allows COPS to stay operational while the migration to NewCOPS is underway; NSW Police has developed an "inter-systems operations model" to ensure stability during the change.
It will similarly need to integrate with 1000 COPS APIs to achieve the "inter-system co-existence", NSW Police has previously said.
In the meantime, NSW Police's IT team has been busy working on preparations for the mass modernisation.
It has moved COPS off its IBM mainframe and onto open systems - a synchronised copy of COPS data is sitting in Oracle Exadata RDBMS until the data can be migrated to a new database - and enabled mobile search on the WebCOPS web-based interface, among other things.
.png&h=140&w=231&c=1&s=0)
_page-0001.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=120&c=1&s=0)
Security Exhibition & Conference 2025
Integrate Expo 2025
Digital As Usual Cybersecurity Roadshow: Brisbane edition
iTnews Benchmark Security Awards 2025
.jpg&h=140&w=231&c=1&s=0)
.jpg&h=140&w=231&c=1&s=0)
