Tasmania's new core policing system goes live

Tasmania’s Department of Police, Fire and Emergency Management has switched on an initial version of the state’s new core policing system to replace its vast estate of legacy systems.

The commercial-off-the-shelf system, dubbed Atlas, went live in October after it was delivered by Brisbane-based systems integrator Bdna and policing software vendor Niche Technology.

It is the result of a three-year program of work by the department under Project Unify, which secured $13 million in 2017 to create an "sophisticated operational information system".

Tasmania Police, which have long struggled with disjointed systems that lack integration, plan to use the Atlas to create “a secure, integrated and contemporary data management environment”.

The system replaces several legacy systems, including Tasmania Police's 30-year-old information data management system, with an integrated system hosted in Microsoft Azure.

iTnews understands the system is the first major Australian policing system to be hosted in Microsoft’s protected-level Azure public cloud service.

Bdna said the system, which is based on NicheRMS, was meticulously integrated into the department’s legacy systems environment.

This involved migrating “over 128 million data records from 6 separate source systems – some housed in databases established in 1988”, it said.

When it came time for go-live, Bdna said “over 400 lines of activities were timed down to the minute and scheduled for execution within a 24 hour window”.

The initial version of Atlas has provided Tasmania Police with almost 64 million data records, improved search capabilities and instant access to intelligence reports.

“Information and intelligence have always been the lifeblood of policing,” Tasmania Police’s project director Commander Mark Mewis said.

“There are obvious safety implications for both the community and our police members if information is delayed, inaccurate or incomplete.”

Functionality will now be added to the system through future releases.

Queensland and South Australia are already using the NicheRMS system to support policing activities, with the Northern Territory set to joint them.