South Australia Police is two years into IS&T transformation

South Australia Police (SAPOL) is now two years into a transformation of its Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) division, which is laying the foundations to move IS&T from a “service provider” to a “trusted advisor and influencer” to the agency. 

IS&T Executive Director Hamish Cameron told the iTnews Podcast that technology “is becoming fundamental to almost everything in policing”, which is driving the elevation of IS&T. 

Already, IS&T - numbering about 300 staff, including contractors - works with both traditional IT as well as on more “specialised police equipment”. 

As the breadth of technology continues to expand, it made sense to shift IS&T “from being more of a service provider towards a trusted adviser and influencer for the business,” Cameron said. 

Work on this started in earnest two years ago, not long after Cameron joined SAPOL to lead IS&T. 

“One of the things that I did when I joined SAPOL going back a few years was to undertake a thorough current state assessment of how IS&T was performing,” he said. 

“It was a fairly frank assessment that helped inform the capabilities and the maturity across some of these capabilities, and what areas I should focus on as a leader within IS&T.” 

The assessment led to an internal transformation program to uplift IS&T’s capabilities in specific areas” including digital. 

“If you don't actually focus on the internal works of the IT organisation, you can't expect it to transition from a service provider to a trusted advisor,” he said. 

“So this transformation program has been going on for about two years now, and each year we do a maturity assessment - myself and my leadership team undertake that frank assessment of where we're at across the different domains, and then we focus on these areas for the next 12 months. 

“We also get measurements through a net promoter score where we ask our ‘customers’ within South Australia Police how we're going, and that is a sort of validation of whether we're moving at the right pace and getting closer to the aspiration of being a trusted advisor.” 

Portfolio and project management (PPM) is one area where capability has been strengthened as a result of the internal transformation. 

SAPOL stood up a project management office (PMO) within IS&T and has spent the past two years “maturing that capability”, Cameron said. 

“We’ve gained significant credibility within the department around our ability to execute on projects and programs of work,” he said. 

“That feedback has been in the form of successfully delivering projects and more transparency in the realisation of benefits for those projects.” 

The efforts have also led to improvements in the auditability of technology-oriented project work. 

IS&T strategy 

Cameron said the IS&T strategy direction reflected SAPOL’s digital strategy, launched last year, which itself is aligned to SAPOL’s ‘Safer Communities’ vision for 2030. 

He called out several important pieces of work, from cyber security initiatives, to SAPOL’s ongoing mobile workforce transformation, and to some more “remedial” works involving core, mostly mainframe-based IT systems. 

“We have a raft of more traditional large systems that we need to either replace, or transform,” he said. 

“We've been on our road to replacing our core records management system, which is our Program Shield, which has been going for approximately 10 years now and we're into the final stages of that.  

“We also are replacing our expiation notice [fines] system, which is again a mainframe-based system, and our firearms register system as well.  

“There's also a large number of other projects that we have in-flight at the moment.” 

In addition, Cameron noted that SAPOL is keeping an eye to future directions of technology as well, particularly as they relate to digital evidence capture, search and analysis, as well as artificial intelligence. 

“We're seeing generative AI playing a role and how we could apply that in a law enforcement context [is] getting a lot of excitement,” Cameron said. 

“That may not be a 12-month proposition [for achievement], but I think exploring how it could be used in the next 12 months is definitely exciting.”