South Yorkshire police data loss

[Garry Edwards]

Yet another police force seems to have run into computer problems, this time SYP admit that they have lost a lot of bodycam footage, which may prejudice ongoing criminal cases. Hopefully it can be recovered, but you'd think that they would have had a backup system. . .
Why does this keep happening with police forces?

 

[ancient_mariner]

Why does this keep happening with police forces?

No-one really steps back and designs IT systems to be fit for purpose of serving the workforces that use them, and budgets are trimmed heavily to the point where things just get lashed together so they kind-of keep working. Often IT systems are designed and managed as if the business or organisations purpose is IT, and the actual work performed is secondary to that. Thus it is that the most important part - the workers and the work they do - becomes a secondary consideration, mistakes are made, sometimes workarounds have to be found by the workers which may result in releases of data accidentally, and everything just runs badly.

Data leaks seem to be happening all over right now, including some high profile and much more IT-centric businesses.

I wonder if IT shouldn't stand for Inhibitive Technology, because it seems to be making life worse, rather than better - speaking as someone who depends on computers for so much of their daily work.

 

[lindsay]

Toni is quite right. I've been in IT for all my career - 45 years and counting - and in the last 15 or so have seen a big shift away from IT serving the business to the opposite. It seems to align with the trends for "agile first", "shift left" and outsourcing, meaning that cost is king, deliver first and fix second is the priority, and process over purpose is the mantra in IT departments. I'm glad I'm not going to continue too much longer, I'll retire when my current job ends (although that may be a few years yet).

 

[ancient_mariner]

Toni is quite right. I've been in IT for all my career - 45 years and counting - and in the last 15 or so have seen a big shift away from IT serving the business to the opposite. It seems to align with the trends for "agile first", "shift left" and outsourcing, meaning that cost is king, deliver first and fix second is the priority, and process over purpose is the mantra in IT departments. I'm glad I'm not going to continue too much longer, I'll retire when my current job ends (although that may be a few years yet).

I'm really sorry to hear you confirm that, Lindsay. Good luck with your escape.

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

It seems to align with the trends for "agile first", "shift left" and outsourcing, meaning that cost is king, deliver first and fix second is the priority, and process over purpose is the mantra in IT departments.

I was in IT for 35 years and started as microprocessors began to appear in general purpose computers. To begin with, the microprocessor systems took on the jobs that no-one wanted to put on the mainframes or minis. As processor speeds and memory sizes grew, more and more stuff went onto the microprocessors.

Because the IT departments wasted a lot of time denying the usefulness of the small computers, managers got into the habit of ignoring IT and bringing in outsiders to build the systems they wanted. Because the outsiders were working to a price, a lot of the control that IT departments had built up over years was thrown out of the nearest window. Sometimes this was to the benefit of the business and sometimes it wasn't.

The police problems are the same as every other organisation has suffered - failure to train and control non-technical staff working with massive and/or sensitive data, because "this is all simple and even an eleven year old could do it".

 

[Jelster]

I sold IT services for 25 years, and the convoluted route that starts at the first customer meeting and ends up with what is delivered used to astound me. We were taught, "understand the customer needs in detail, so we can build a solution to their requirements". What usually happened was the presales designers gave the customer what they wanted, and then the deployment team cut corners, get asked "can you just add this" etc until what is actually delivered is nothing like what we promised to provide. Then I would have to go in and sort out the unhappy customer.

Quite simply, customers expect far too much for the budget, the scope starts to creep, then the supplier cuts corners to either save money or hit a delivery date. And, most (not all) project managers buckle rather than trying to keep the solution on track in terms of design & functionality. The result is a new solution that doesn't quite do what it should, the way it was meant to, and the users were never consulted anyway....

 

[Garry Edwards]

Fair enough, maybe IT has become an end rather than a means to an end, and if so then this would seem to at least partly explain the repeated data leakages and losses. I know, as a "customer" that the NHS has several systems that don't talk to each other and simply don't work, may be this is widespread elsewhere too.

My guess with the repeated police problems would have been management inefficiency, because it seems to be rife, but it doesn't seem to be that simple.

 

[lindsay]

Police IT is something I've worked in, in the past, but centrally rather than Force-based. Some forces do it well, others less so. I think it comes back to the big issue of having 43 forces in England and Wales, rather than one like Scotland or NI. Having said that, data control is often a weak point due to lack of understanding. The NI data loss (the spreadsheet released to the web) was almost certainly a case of someone using Excel filters to cut down the data visible, not realising that you could turn off the filters and see everything. Losing a laptop, deliberately or accidentally, does happen - I had two stolen from my car once, both with secure data on them, but they were so locked down they would have self-destructed if someone tried very hard to break in. I don't know details of the South Yorks instance yet.
NHS IT is a whole other ballgame - lack of systems integration is unforgivable, considering how relatively straightforward it can be. But remember the big project to join everything up back in the 2005 or thereabouts period? I think Andersen's were running it, and they just screwed it up big time. I've run pan-European integration projects more complex than that, which did take a long time, but were achieved successfully through good collaboration. I suspect the issue in the NHS is based on local managers not wanting to lose their positions of influence to a centrally-managed entity (of which there are many in the NHS).

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

I suspect the issue in the NHS is based on local managers not wanting to lose their positions of influence to a centrally-managed entity (of which there are many in the NHS).

That's certainly part of the problem.

I designed two of the early contract management systems for newly created "trusts" and worked on (read: "attempted to fix") two others. The two I did start to finish were designed to take in the minimum of data and squirt the final results at the local minis. The important thing in those was to get the user interface right, so that staff had the least extra work to do. Both went in and worked, not due to anything clever but simply by following the basic rule of writing the manual first and getting that signed off by the users, then making no changes until after the system had gone live and the users knew what needed to be changed (not a lot in either case).

The two that needed fixing exhibited the usual lack of forethought or understanding and appeared to have been "designed" on the back of a very small cigarette packet.

 

[Lunkwill Fouk]

Mistake

 

[Mr Bump]

i spend my life in and out of government comms/server rooms and i am not surprised at this kind of thing occurring.
gov are a nightmare , i have seen so many servers/switches etc with flashing orange and red warning lights, failed drives that literally just get ignored until they fail completely.
tape drives still running on 10 year old tapes that wouldn't stand a chance of a restore.