Byrne Tony Byrne

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When cops won't use their ECM system

29-Jan-2007

Tags: , Document Management (ECM), Marketplace at Large, Government

The bigger the IT project, the lower the chance of success. Witness the Hampshire (UK) Constabulary, who spent £11m over 2 years customizing a records management system from the eponymous Canadian software vendor Niche Technologies. The final Phase III of the project has been cancelled amid recriminations of poor training and usability. An after-action report (MS Word) by the program manager notes,

The programme was structured to significantly re-engineer and develop business process and to then map these onto the RMS software. The scale of this development process and Niche's ability to respond within our own project timescales led to the late re-prioritisation of functional change requests and a slippage in training and support material delivery in both Phases I and II....Communications to all stakeholders has proved to be very challenging and there is a real issue for the force about how it communicates with its staff.

To be fair, this project does not appear to have failed, as so many do. Rather it just came up short, but that was enough to receive the dreaded "bad rap" among rank-and-file officers, making future adoption all that much harder.

 

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