Police NSW Legacy Migration

Services

UX/UI design

Web application development

Project Scoping

Technology

C# Bot

Brief

The NSW Police Force is one of the largest police organisations in the English speaking world. To help the Police NSW on their digital transformation journey, WorkingMouse modernised some of their current legacy systems.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

How might we quickly modernise legacy systems within Police NSW starting with the Fatals Database?

Learn about our process and solutions:

Government Solutions Capability Statement

Let's take a deep dive

Understanding the problem

In late 2018 WorkingMouse and Codebots qualified as finalists in the NSW Pitch to Pilot program. As part of the program we were able to pitch the Codebots firecracker migration method via the Codebots platform and Continuous Modernisation Playbook to several senior NSW IT leaders. Following the event, WorkingMouse was contacted by NSW Police Force and given the opportunity to pilot Codebots within the organisation. The project comprised of beginning to modernise their 200 plus legacy Access databases that sit within their operational division.

Ideation & research

To begin, we ran a proof of concept that focused on modernising 7 Fatal Crash Microsoft Access Databases. The offline system is used by the traffic research and intelligence unit as part of their traffic & highway patrol command. There were three key issues the team aimed to tackle. 1. The information was stored on outdated Microsoft Access Databases which is not in line with the Department's modern web-based skill set. 2. The support required from the internal IT department was significant due to the databases breaking and the constant reloading of backups. 3. The time it would take for the safety team to copy the data over from the COPS system on a daily basis.

After 2 weeks of Discovery, 2 months in development, 147 feature tickets...

The solution

We approached the problem by migrating the 7 databases into a central entity diagram using the firecracker migration pathway. In doing so we were able to simplify the 7 different systems down to 1 new modern web based application. The application created is now a modern .Net Core (C#) server side with a React client side. The application is in line with Police NSW's modern IT skill set making it easier to run and support. They are now able to host in their on premise environment securely. In addition to the migration the project team were able to add on several useful behaviours and functionality. The team added the following: 1. Active Directory integration for auto login 2. API to internal Oracle DB to automatically input the new daily data saving a significant amount of time. 3. Customer Reports. 4. CRUD behaviour for all entities 5. Restful JSON API Overall, the team were happy that the new system met all technical requirements from the IT side but also covered all of the original functionality from the old system.