Victim Support Case Management
Victim support receive daily crime feeds from most of the police forces around the UK and after rationalising the many different data sets distribute the cases to teams of operators around the country offering support to the victims of crime.
Because of the volume of the cases and the urgency inherent in the nature of these cases it is important that any system operates efficiently and timely.
Because of the very personal and sensitive data contained within this system, the data has to be secured and contained in a highly secure environment.
Disaster
After the collapse of their previous supplier, Victim Support were trapped with a incomplete system hosted in an expensive data centre.
Our job was to move the entire server farm up to a Police Data Centre in West Yorkshire over one weekend ensuring all the nation wide teams could continue working as normal the following Monday morning.
The Move
One of our teams of engineers spent the entire week mapping and understanding the application architecture, documenting the system, tracing the cabling, preparing domain name changes and creating the process maps for proving the system was working correctly once the system was relocated.
Our project managers meticulously planned the equipment move, organised the secure shipping of the equipment, and prepared the target site ready for the move.
Early Saturday morning we dismantled the system component by component, labelled all the cables and loaded all the hardware onto the specialised truck that was to transport the equipment to Yorkshire.
The Equipment landed late Saturday evening and out team worked through the night re-assembling the system and spent Sunday testing the solution, moving IP Addresses and domain names and documenting its new home.
Monday morning came and the good work at Victim Support continued as normal.
The Application
Victim Support’s previous providers had produced an application that was both unreliable and written in such a way that made code changes extremely challenging.
The system would be unresponsive for major parts of the day and required constant rebooting throughout the week.
The reason the application degenerated into an unmanageable mess was a direct result the following issues:
No one responsible for the overall architectural design
A poor understanding of the actual requirements
A reliance on contract developers. (this is a recurring problem we see within the industry)
- contractors have a poor understanding of the overall design.
- contractors have each developed their own development styles.
- contractors are generally used to working alone so have poor team skills
- contractors have their own development workflows
And the biggest problem is that contractors have their own agenda. Namely, to make their contract last as long as possible.
We have encountered many situations where contractors have gone to great lengths to extend the length of a project.
The Rewrite
Each police force is supplying data to Victim Support in their own unique manner. Spreadsheets, text files, structured text reports are just some of the formats employed by Police Forces.
It was clear that the reception of data from all the police forces, and the necessary processing of that data, should be performed separately from the main case management engine. This was one of the major mistakes made by the original application whereby the processing of the received data would cause major performance issues with the main case management system
Claritas developed a seperate data processing engine that was free to receive data and simply injected the cases into the main case management system Click here to meet the data processing engine
Claritas also re wrote the case management system.
Delivery
It took just over nine months to design, develop, roll out and train the whole of Victim Support on the new system.
Claritas:
- Hosted the system in a West Yorkshire secure data centre
- Designed and created the case management system in consultation with key stakeholders.
- Designed and created the data transfer engine.
- Proved the security model and accredited the system
- Designed and created a training course for the new system.
- Designed and produced a training environment that was shipped around the country and used to train all the operator teams on the new software.
- Claritas delivered the new, optimised, performant system both on time and on budget.
Support
For over 10 years we have managing the complete case management solution for Victim Support.
- The Hardware
- Hosting
- Infrastrure
- Networks
- Security
- Application support
- Application changes
- GDPR governance
Not once was there a data breach, hacking event, ransom ware incident or security failure.
The Future
Victim Support made the decision to store their data in a public cloud over 2 years ago and employed the services of another provider to transition their services to the ‘Cloud’.
They are still endeavouring to make this transition and so far it has taken 5 times as long to move their data onto a prebuilt system than it did to deliver their entire system in the first place.
It is a recurring trend we see where companies labour under the illusion that migrating to “The Cloud” is cheaper and simpler.
We have taken pride in our association with Victim Support and feel privileged to have been trusted with their system for over 10 years.
