Advice: stop development of ‘complicated and expensive’ central ICT police system
The ICT Verification Office advises the police to stop developing the Operational Police Platform, a new police system in which millions of euros have already been invested. Wrong choices have been made, the committee believes.
The police have been working on the Operational Police System since 2012 and at the end of 2018, 44 million euros had already been involved in the development. There are currently two applications for it, Execution & Signaling and eBriefing, which together cost 16 million euros. Nevertheless, the Bureau ICT-verification, BIT, advises to stop the project and to change tack. The system is ‘risky, unnecessarily complicated and expensive’, according to Trouw, the committee concludes, which is based on a document from Minister Knops of the Interior.
That document states that the committee speaks of an ‘over-ambitious approach with an uncertain foundation’. Among other things, the committee denounces the decision to completely replace the current systems: “We fear that this will mean that the improved support for operational police work will be a long time coming.”
The project involves the complete replacement of more than twelve existing systems with a new, modular system. That should be achieved in five to seven years, which the committee calls ‘very ambitious and risky’: “There is a very good chance that achieving that result will cost much more time and money than anticipated, if it succeeds at all. “
The entire project would take about 1250 man-years of work and the ICT Testing Office fears that the police will have difficulty finding and retaining the necessary 100 FTEs of good developers. In addition, it is complex software: the platform contains the self-developed programming languages OPP Data Language and the domain-specific OPP Modeling Language. The mechanisms for modelling, synchronizing and validating data and guaranteeing integrity have also been developed in-house. There is no knowledge and support for this and the police will have to train developers themselves.
The BIT recommends abandoning the idea of complete replacement, narrowing the scope and developing smaller, more decoupled systems that work together on the basis of services. The advice is also to use market-based technology and generic functionalities, such as the electronic signature. Minister Grapperhaus of Justice reports to Trouw that stopping is not an option, but that he is having an external agency investigate how the OPP can be improved.