CLIENT STORY
Building Innovative APIs for Community Safety
A case study on an implementation of an API Management Platform for Victoria Police in Australia.
THE ECOSYSTEM AT A GLANCE
- Digital transformation and and capability uplift underpinned by API technologies.
- APIs providing secure real time access to the mobile workforce of 10,000 police officers.
- APIs enable new technologies in the field such as patrol car cameras, body cameras, tasers cameras and drones.
- APIs driving intelligent decision-making.
Victoria Police are on a multi-year journey to transform their technology environment. They aim to achieve a major capability uplift that will allow them to exploit a real-time information environment and achieve improved outcomes for our community.
This journey that Victoria Police have embarked upon is an ambitious IT upgrade that will see officers and cars equipped with video cameras linked to back-end systems with analytics. The program, known as BlueConnect, aims to provide information in real time on incidents, enable officers to take video evidence at a crime scene and prepare reports and charges online as they are returning to the station.
eBlueprint helped Victoria Police to achieve BlueConnect’s capability uplift through the implementation of an API Management Platform and secure mission critical APIs that now provide officers with with real time information and analytics.
THE CHALLENGES
Victoria Police have recognised that its existing technology mounted in agency vehicles was limited in its usefulness to mobile officers as it limited their ability to obtain critical policing information while away from their vehicle, and for non-motorised patrols this meant a significant lack of information and a reliance on the radio network.
Victoria Police also understood existing back-end systems and processes are not based on an open architecture for the secure and rapid exchange of information and business workflows.
HOW WE HELPED
To meet the required business outcomes for the BlueConnect program, Victoria Police selected eblueprint through a competitive procurement process to delivery the following capabilities:
- Technology Thought Leadership – to translate business drivers and requirements into an actionable API Management solution that would meet current requirements and scale for future needs.
- API Management Architecture and Design – creating extensible contemporary designs that meet current business drivers that also can be extended to future demands.
- API Platform Infrastructure Design and Build – implementing secure infrastructure using technologies such as Boud, Containers and DevOps.
- Complex and Extensible API Design & Coding – using our deep implementation experience and industry best practices across numerous successful cross-industry engagements.
- API Security – providing industry best practices designs, advice and implementation focusing on authentication, authorisation, data encryption, management of secure storage and threat mitigation.
- API Quality Assurance and Testing – testing and quality engineering encompassing API functionality, performance, scalability, resilience and security.
- Managed Services – a further 5-year engagement to support Victoria Police with the ongoing support, operations, site reliability engineering and continual improvements of the API Management platforms.
THE RESULTS
The solution that eBlueprint designed, implemented and currently manages has been successfully rolled-out in a multi-staged approach to 10,000 frontline police officers, providing the following benefits:
- Boosting workforce and community safety through access to real-time information.
- Law Enforcement services delivered more efficiently on the frontline leading to more effective policing.
- Capability uplift providing Law Enforcement significant improvement in intelligent reporting and decision-making, resulting in achieving higher standards and better measurable performance.
- Enabling cross-agency information sharing.
“By 2020, on the way back to the station we expect to be able to use boice recognition to enable you to start preparing a case, electronically integrating video from the body-worn camera, the car camera, the Taser cameras and the phone.” – Dallas Reilly, CIO Victoria Police