Delivering better services, greater agility and improved efficiency through digital transformation

Digital transformation has long been something of a holy grail for emergency services, as the combination of rapid advances in technology and the significant growth in demand for a bluelight response have underlined the potential benefits in efficiency and effectiveness that digital could deliver.

Those benefits have come into even sharper focus over the last three years, firstly as the Covid-19 pandemic placed greater emphasis on the need for flexible and secure remote working, and subsequently as the economic crises now being experienced by many countries have put public sector budgets under intense pressure.

One man who understands better than most the opportunities offered by digital transformation – and the challenges bluelight organisations face in successfully undertaking that change – is Nick Chorley, Director (EMEA) of Public Safety & Security within the Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division of Hexagon.

The company, a world leader in digital reality and autonomous solutions, works across the emergency services on a wide range of projects and processes, from managing and sharing information and enhancing investigations to ensuring officer and staff safety, improving dispatching and response capabilities, and capturing and preserving evidence.

And for Nick, the key aims of digital transformation are clear: “It’s all about doing more with less, and having the flexibility to change, adapt and update as necessary,” he explained. “Digital transformation is so important to do – and to get right – to deal with all the pressures that the police and other bluelight services are facing.”

Different journeys

However, the vagaries of the differing pace of development between organisations and sectors, and – particularly in the UK – the fragmented nature both of individual force procurement and progress, and the different funding arrangements and approaches across the various bluelight services, means that the transformation journey for each force and agency can look very different.

“Most of those services feel like they’ve got problems with their technology, that it’s not up to date, and it’s letting them down,” continued Nick. “That’s a pre-cursor to digital transformation, because if they haven’t got a modern technology stack that’s flexible, agile and enables them to do what they want to do, then they are facing challenges. So, they need to do that foundation step first.

“Everybody is in a different place; some people are on such ancient technology that they are struggling to make even fairly small updates, and they can’t adapt to meet new government regulations and directives.

“From a platform perspective, they are also leaving themselves vulnerable to attack – although perversely, some of the technology is so ancient that it becomes largely cut off from the outside world and is therefore really quite safe!

“But quite a few forces are in that middle ground where they’ve got reasonably flexible technology, so they can update it, but it’s very expensive and slow to get their suppliers to make changes. Their tech is modern enough to be vulnerable, though, if they haven’t got their cyber security sorted out.”

Consumers and colleagues

The importance of strengthening security while delivering a better service to the public is not the only driver for digital transformation. The difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff post-pandemic are adding to the burden of bluelight organisations, and the expectations of how new technology should improve the working structure and environment have a big part to play.

“Both for citizens as consumers of the service, and for the workforce as citizens of the modern world who are providing that service, the standards and expectations of what technology can deliver are set by what those citizens can achieve with commercial products on a daily basis, through their internet, their web browsers and their smartphones,” said Nick.

“I think it’s fairly obvious to see that from the service user point of view, although perhaps less obvious to recognise it from a workforce perspective. But it’s one of the reasons why organisations have real difficulties, especially since the pandemic, in recruiting anybody to perform some of these roles.”

With staff turnover rates in emergency services call centres – particularly police and ambulance – worryingly high, Nick believes that anything that can be done to improve the working conditions can give forces a better chance of recruiting and retaining the right people, especially when staff salaries are under pressure.

“For example, in a large city like London, some of the staff have to commute an hour and a half each way into work every day. When you’re not paid much, that’s a big chunk of your money and your life.

“So, if you can give them access to their job via remote working, which a lot of commercial organisations do, that’s not only better for them but also better for the force.”

There are also external drivers for digital transformation, such as the new standards being brought in as part of the move to ‘Next Gen 999’: “When Next Gen 999 comes in, there will be a standard protocol in place for the exchange of call and caller information, and also incident information,” said Nick.

“So even if everyone is using different systems, it should improve the caller experience, because all the information that is being collected should follow that call.”

Challenges of scale

Hexagon has extensive experience and expertise across all three bluelight services and has been supplying police forces around the world since the early 1990s.

The company currently works with more than 400 police forces, including Bavaria and Saxony in Germany, national forces in Belgium, Denmark, New Zealand and several of the Australian states and Spanish provinces, and many US forces.

“We provide multi-agency systems which are much more prevalent in the US, where police, fire and ambulance all share the same system,” said Nick.

“It’s a sensible, obvious thing to do, and it’s been tried in the UK: but when each bluelight service is being driven by different government departments with different priorities, it just doesn’t happen.”

Despite that, Hexagon works with a number of police forces in the UK, including the Metropolitan Police, although as Nick points out, “it’s often the smaller forces that can be more agile when it comes to digital transformation”.

“Re-supplying a larger organisation has its own challenges, partly because their existing systems are often much older, and partly because older systems are often custom built.

“To give them something that is configured exactly how they are used to working means a lot of discussion, and in larger organisations that can take a long time.

“Smaller forces often have an advantage in this type of transformation. They can often afford to make more radical changes without it having such significant ramifications. They also don’t have some of the national responsibilities that larger forces sometimes do.”

Larger organisations also present challenges around staff turnover and timeframes: “If you don’t have measurable aims that can be achieved in a small timeframe, personnel can change quite a bit, and you can often get new attitudes and agendas coming in while the process is already underway,” continued Nick.

But for all clients, the age and state of the existing ICT platforms are a common consideration: “If you haven’t got a platform that is agile enough to start changing things and digitising your processes, it becomes very hard to automate anything.

“Then you have the ‘double whammy’, having to go through the pain of procurement, and the pain of implementation, before you can even get to first base. If you’re in that position, it’s a real struggle.”

Delivering solutions

Whatever the scale of the client or starting point of their journey, Nick is confident that the solutions offered by Hexagon’s HxGN OnCall portfolio, as part of a digital transformation process, can deliver significant improvements – both for the agency and the citizens who use their services.

And key elements in creating that positive change are the move to cloud-based architecture, and the use of browser-based services.

“Being able to deliver these services and this technology through a browser has been standard practice in the commercial world for more than 20 years, but in the emergency services space that’s still pretty unusual, and I don’t think many of our competitors are offering that,” explained Nick.

“For example, for a large client, you might have a thousand desktops that would otherwise need to be individually managed. But using a browser-based approach, we don’t need to deploy anything to those desktops. Users just need a URL that can follow their profile from machine to machine.

“So, they can sit at a desk that they’ve never used before, the URL will be available to them once they log in, and then everything flows from that. That makes everything so much easier to manage from a system point of view and also enables so much more around home or remote working.”

The scalability of cloud-based services means that forces can respond more quickly and effectively to major events, while also running a leaner, more efficient operation during quieter times.

“The architecture means it’s easier as an organisation to move away from being a monolith and towards accessing and consuming everything as services that can be scaled up or down, according to need,” continued Nick. “And as long as all the architecture on the cloud has been done correctly, that can all happen automatically.”

Browser-based delivery also enables easier integration of other resources, which can have significant operational benefits: “You might not only want to use your own services, you might want to call on other services and information that’s available, and this approach makes that so much easier.

“For example, you can pull in a weather map, or a map of all the bus routes around a specific location – you just configure the URL of the service and it’s there; it’s a modern approach to architecture that can really enhance operational effectiveness.”

Journey’s end?

With emergency services generally – and policing in particular – facing renewed pressures around quality of service, increased demand and reduced budgets, it should be no surprise that making better use of the technology available (and that which is coming down the line) has become a key concern for many forces and agencies.

For Nick and the team at Hexagon, the potential benefits of digital transformation are recognised, understood and regularly delivered – wherever organisations begin their journey.

But the huge potential of that transformational journey – including the more effective use of artificial intelligence and autonomous processes, the progress it offers in relation to staff wellbeing, and the resource savings and service agility that it can create – can bring its own challenges.

“When you start working with customers and go through what is possible, quite often their eyes will suddenly open up to all sorts of ideas about how the changes and systems we’re envisaging could be used,” said Nick.

“It’s a good problem to have, but if you’re not careful you end up continually re-starting the design process, which can make things very difficult from a procurement perspective.

“So, it’s a fine line between opening the client’s eyes to what is available, and then getting best value from what we’re offering, while making sure the project doesn’t change too frequently or significantly so it can keep to time and budget.”

While it can require a delicate balancing act on the part of Hexagon and their clients, ultimately the benefits of digital transformation far outweigh the challenges along that journey.