Craig Ward

Craig Ward was taken completely off guard when he was approached and offered the role of CIO at the Western Australia Police; as someone with little technical knowledge, managing a $200 million organisational ICT spend and a team of around 300 technical people was hardly the next step he would have expected to take in his self-described “zen career path.”

A year on, however, the 29-year police veteran – who joined the force as a fresh-faced 17 year old and worked his way through positions including detective, Police Academy trainer, undercover operative, and internal affairs – has embraced and relished the role. And that role came with “quite a learning curve” as he worked to get up to speed with the technology supporting what is, with over 5,000 police managing 157 police stations across 2.5 million square kilometres, the world’s largest police jurisdiction.

Ward came aboard during a time of significant change – including a major restructuring to IT supplier arrangements, a concerted push to improve front-end mobility, and a major information-driven policing effort that has seen major crimes decline by over 12 per cent. And as he commemorates the end of his first year in the job, he feels a palpable mixture of pride at what he has already achieved, and excitement at what’s yet
to come.

Police intelligence

Stepping into the CIO’s shoes was a major change from Ward’s previous role, where he had spent 18 months working in WA Police’s Strategy and Performance Directorate (SPD). There, he was involved with setting and reviewing operational KPIs, creating strategic plans for Police divisions, and writing business plans that sought to bring better visibility to the department’s operations.

A significant part of his work within the SPD related to a project called – and Ward himself laughs as he says it – FBI. That’s short for ‘Front-line Business Improvement’, a data-driven business intelligence (BI) initiative with the aim of improving police reporting through the collection, analysis and distribution of relevant performance data.

By building up a back-end reporting and analysis capability, the FBI effort was designed to save field officers from tedious, repetitive data analysis at the end of their shifts so they could spend more time on the beat; instead, the back-end systems could centralise the data they collected and take care of analysing it.

This allowed Ward’s team to isolate business functions and calculate highly relevant performance metrics based on discrete functions rather than overly-broad and potentially misleading KPIs. “We were able to get out in the field and using credible front-line, respected police officers to figure out what the issues were,” Ward recalls.

“Using back-of-house technical people, we produced a really strong regime of planning and performance management. We created this information strategy regime, pulled apart all the bits of the business and put out strategies that were very fundamental to our policing. That’s where I really started to get an understanding of what the key performance metrics were.”

Applying those metrics to police practice – aiming for what WA Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan referred to as being “almost a franchise model”, in which all areas of the state provide the same level of service – proved enlightening for Ward.

Understanding performance metrics is one thing, but acting to change them is an entirely different thing, as Ward found out early on. Police can get “very engrossed in statistics”, he says, and it’s hard to get them to focus on big issues – for example, how incidence of a crime is changing across the state instead of focusing on how many arrests can be made in a small local area.

The systems supporting this BI push evolved steadily, from its early days using Excel spreadsheets to later efforts involving SAS analytical tools that provided enough drill-down capabilities that officers could monitor enforcement trends down to the suburb level.

It was a coup for evidence-based policing, and Ward says that by the time the team-based effort had gained real momentum, improved reporting was fuelling better-targeted enforcement that had contributed to an observed 12.7 per cent decrease in ‘volume crime’ – stealing, damage, burglary and other high-impact crimes.

“These are the things we target with good metrics and good reporting,” Ward explains. “We’ve linked them with an integrated planning framework that drives it down to the coal face. Officers can just do their jobs, and we’ll find a way of turning their reporting into data at the end of the day.”

Upwardly mobile

After spending 18 months working on the use of BI to improve policing visibility and strategies, the next step in Ward’s career path revealed itself when O’Callaghan rang him up and offered him the CIO position. “It came as quite a surprise,” Ward recalls. “I said ‘you know I don’t have the technical knowledge for that’, and he told me he wanted me for the business acumen – not the technical skills. ‘We have people with those skills’, he told me.”

And so Ward took on a role that had been vacant since August 2008, then filled by Acting Director of Corporate Programs and Development Tony O’Donoghue, until Ward took over in January 2010. And while there was “quite a learning curve” to deal with, his long-term commitment to the police and his success in earlier reporting projects equipped him well for the transition.

It has been a busy year. As well as consolidating the data-management strategy he had been working on in SPD, Ward has been working steadily on a variety of projects to both improve operational support on the ground, and to consolidate the WA Police IT infrastructure – which includes around 5,000 desktops, laptops, servers, and similar devices – through an aggressive virtualisation effort.

Mobility has been a key issue for Ward throughout the year, with a growing investment in Telstra’s Next-G 3G network allowing officers to access the TARDIS WA Police communications network from a growing range of handheld devices. Officers have already been supported with three different types of mobile information device – an in-car system, a ‘TARDIS Light’ handheld system based on a Motorola PDA, a planned ‘TARDIS Lighter’ based on the Motorola ES400 ‘enterprise digital assistant’ – and a fourth, ‘TARDIS Executive’, is being rolled out as a Windows Mobile 6.5-based HTC HD2 smartphone.

The variety of mobile devices allows the deployment of the most appropriate technology for each situation, but the shift towards more-capable mobile platforms also has a more pedestrian reason. “We were using BlackBerrys and they’re a great product, but were somewhat limited by their screen size and capacity to bring down PDFs,” Ward explains.

“We’ve got a fairly young demographic in terms of constables coming through, and they’re used to what they have at home. We know we can’t give them everything they can buy at Harvey Norman, but we recognise technology moves quickly and we want to give them everything we can.”

That doesn’t extend to the iPad, however. “Everyone wants one, but nobody knows why they want it,” laughs Ward, who has great interest in low-power-consumption tablet-styled devices using ‘e-ink’. “We eventually want to get to the point of being device agnostic, but we think there is an application for tablets in coming years.”

Outsourcing and insourcing

While analysing and delivering data to mobile devices has been an operational priority in the field, Ward has been wrestling with even more ambitious projects that affect the department’s internal IT infrastructure and outsourcing arrangements.

For example, a growing WA government push towards a shared-services model will complement the department’s virtualisation efforts, and pay dividends by facilitating a more-flexible and more-reliable IT operations model. The department may even be able to take a shared-services leadership role, Ward says, and has been in talks with department executives about the possibility of creating a whole-of-government CIO position and a CIO Council – potentially mirroring the structure already in place in NSW.

Service delivery goals are more than academic: with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to hit Perth in October 2011 and no less than Her Majesty the Queen expected to attend, WA Police will need to have the force running in tip-top shape. And that, Ward believes, is a goal best accomplished through instant access to relevant information and a back-end infrastructure that’s reliable enough to ensure continuous availability of relevant systems.

“The days of having your own massive, power-hungry data centres are a thing of the past,” he explains. “CHOGM will have quite an interesting impact on policing, and on technology and communications particularly. We’re keen to make sure we’re well placed; we don’t want things falling over.”

Supporting the shared-services push is a dramatic reworking of the department’s outsourcing arrangements that has progressively replaced incumbent Fujitsu with a range of providers tasked to different parts of the supplier relationship. This includes a service desk and infrastructure systems from Kinetic IT; project management from Ajilon (which last year won a $53 million, five-year contract to manage WA Police applications and support), CSC ($15 million over five years); and strategic consulting, planning, project and program delivery from Fujitsu ($15 million over three years), Broadreach Consulting and Empired ($5 million over three years).

The changes in these relationships were already underway when Ward took the reins at WA Police, but he says they have improved the department’s flexibility and ability to execute projects. To ensure a continual flow of fresh ideas, organisations providing strategic planning services are prohibited from delivering day-to-day services, and vice versa. “It was one of those great foundational pieces that set us up for success,” he explains.

Older, wiser

As he heads into his second year as CIO, Ward is focused on a variety of initiatives: expanding the force’s use of Next-G for mobile data on the road; an ongoing partnership with police and ambulance services in a $25 million project to expand their shared digital communications network to rural centres; ongoing efforts to manage servers and other devices in some of the world’s most remote jurisdictions; and ensuring that the WA Police platforms are technically compatible with application platforms being installed across other parts of the government.

Underlying all this change is the ever-present need to engage users and manage their service expectations, which have increased as changes have improved service levels. “When I arrived, it was fairly clear that there was a lack of engagement,” says Ward, who realised early on that there were fundamental problems pairing business-focused ‘goldfish’ – people who “like shiny things but have a short attention span” – and tech-savvy ‘dolphins’ that are, he laughs, “really smart but can’t talk to humans.”

“We were seen as blockers rather than helping out, and we had traditionally sat and waited for the business to do things for us,” he explains. “I’ve been trying to turn that around: we’re now active contributors, and trying to be on the front foot and proactively engage with the business. It’s more and more apparent that the CIO has become more business-focused.”

A business focus may be a prerequisite of the role, but the real test comes when Ward talks with the people his division is designed to serve. And in that regard, he’s happy to have been something of a change agent. “When I speak with my peers now, they say that it has really turned around,” he says. “They had gotten so used to asking for help and being told either ‘no’ or that it was going to take six months. Now, they’re actually getting good service, very quickly. I’m most proud of that.”