Unisys nicks £1.7m police contract

Unisys has signed a £1.7m deal with Humberside police to overhaul its core IT applications so that vital intelligence information can be sent more easily to officers attending an incident.

Humberside will consolidate its data warehouses into a 'knowledge management' portal to store and manage information accessed by 3,000 officers across the region. Some work will also be done re-engineering systems relating to intelligence, crime and domestic violence.

Graham Dawson, head of information services at Humberside Police, told silicon.com this vital information is currently available to officers only through disparate systems.

"We are integrating the data and pulling it together so it is much more useful for operational police. It gives us the ability to share information with partner forces," he said.

Dawson said the force is pursuing an "aggressive timetable" for the project, with a three-month pilot due to run until March before a full roll-out that will see most of the system completed by the end of 2004.

It is a major project for Humberside police and Dawson said that along with the implementation of several national projects such as case preparation and custody systems it will be a busy year for the force's IT department.

"We are putting in a lot of new IT systems, some of them national ones. That's one heck of a 12 months," he said.