Using the latest technologies, such as the Internet, to enhance the government services to the public in the United Kingdom has been underpinned by the British government's emphasis of several key e-initiatives, including e-policing and integration of criminal justice IT (CJIT) systems. This paper presents an overview of on-going system re-engineering and integration programmes in the Police Force in UK, highlighting key cases as well as lessons we have been learning from undertaking and managing these programmes.

There exists a wide range of IT systems that have been developed in last several decades in the forty-three police forces in UK, serving 250,000 on-duty police officers throughout the country as well as the larger CJIT community. Many of these system are currently being upgraded with added functionality's, while new systems are continuously being developed and rolled-out. Integrating such a wide range of new and legacy systems in the Police Force, and linking these systems to those in the CJIT communities (including the British Crown Court, the Crown Prosecution Service, the National Probation Service, etc.) and other government agencies (e.g., the Home Office), has been undertaken under the guideline of a national IS Strategy for the Police Service (ISS4PS) published earlier this year.

Further effort has been made to join similar initiatives and programmes in other European countries, in an effort to provide the EU-wide or even global police intelligence and counter-crime capabilities. A component based information architecture, with XML and Web Services at its core, formulates the basis for most of these programmes. Lead cases and projects are as follows.

1. Integrating new and legacy systems using a system-to-system messaging model, has been deployed in the forces such as the Metropolitan Police Service (the Scotland Yard). The implementation is moving towards asynchronised and loose-coupling messaging middleware (as a messaging hub), from the traditional model of tight coupling between legacy systems. Such systems will be further migrating in the near future towards the UK national Corporate Data Model (CorDM) for the Police Force, and possibly the Web Services based system architecture, in line with ISS4PS.

2. Integration via the request-and-response broker based architecture, such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) architecture, has been deployed in the Police National Computer (PNC), which is served as a central information repository with criminal records etc. PNC responds to quires from a wide range of users from police officers on duty to staff in the European Intelligence Bureau. The ongoing work is to extend the current broker architecture, and move it towards XML/Web Services architecture in the PNC Modernisation Programme.

3. Integrating the legacy systems via data gateways or meta-data centres, has been used in several regional forces. The concept is to load the data from legacy systems into a central or regional data centres (e.g., a data warehouse), in which meta-data can be abstracted and legacy data schema be mapped to a common data (interchange) schema. An ongoing project of setting up such a data centre, the Cross Region Information Sharing Project (CRISP), is designated to serve about ten police forces in the North West England. The common data model/schema in CRISP conforms to CorDM. This will facilitate future integration and data exchange between these forces and the rest of the country and the CJIT.

In this paper, we will elaborate these key case studies, highlighting the similarity and difference between them. We will also present how all of these cases/projects will converge towards a XML/Web Services based national IT architecture for the Police Force' IT systems in UK, as well as migration/deployment strategies and project management. We will conclude with the lessons learnt from our experiences in managing and undertaking these programmes, as well as the future plan for the next several years.