They have been hacked by OfficeWorld
who are now doing great business selling note books & pencils!
Greater Manchester Police is struggling with a partial outage of a Capita-built computer system used by frontline officers to input information. The PoliceWorks systems, which form part of the force's new iOPS (Integrated Police Operating System) – a £27m project undertaken by everyone's favourite outsourcer – went down after …
Considering that the latest statistics show that only a nugatory percentage of crimes actually get investigated, I'd say that a systems failure could lock every single GMP officer in their own cells for a week and still have minimal impact on their crime clear-up rates or public reputation.
If there's only minimal impact from the system going down
it shows that the disaster planning worked a treat. This should be a big thumbs up for the force, being able to carry on effectively, despite the system failing.
This shows rule 1 of IT automation hasn't changed. When I first started designing systems, the first thing we had to do was to document the manual fallback procedure to carry on working in the event of a disaster.
Knowing Crapita, I suspect that the member of Crapita staff implenting their upgrades is normally employed in the canteen cleaning up but has an interest in IT, so he gets an extra fiver when he does a bit of PC work. Probably , he got to do the upgrade at pub o clock on a Friday.
"We have robust contingency plans that are successfully executed across the force to minimise disruptions,"
You gave me a USB stick before you'd used that you hadn't secure wiped. Yes, wasn't you're force but I suspect you're all the same and aren't given the proper tools or training to secure wipe that drive before giving it to me.
This, evidently, includes the cutting-edge technology appropriate to a world-class police force: pencil and paper. Robust indeed.
When I started in IT, back in the late 1980s, the first thing you did when planning a new system was to also implement an offline contingency procedure to keep working, if the main systems went offline.
For something as critical as a police force, I would darned well hope that they have manual procedures to fall back on.
The reality is that any contract letting Capita do anything has to be dodgy. The only thing they do well is to draft contracts within contracts which allow them to charge huge amounts of money for screwing up, or even doing nothing at all.
Signing a Capita contract guarantees nothing except a huge bill.
I guess that someone must be getting rich, because Capita keep getting contracts, even though they never seem to deliver what's promised
There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that even lets them into the bidding.
Probably something on the lines of "we take our responsibilities very seriously, and there really isn't a problem anyway"
I wish I could perform like this and still keep the work coming in. We, the small guys that HMRC seems to hate, have to deliver working systems reliably to stay in business, but once you reach a certain scale you apparently become both entitled to screw up regularly and immune to criticism.