 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. For this segment, we have two guests. First, we have Helen Davis. She is the Senior Director Cloud Platform Services Assistant Director for IT and Digital for the West Midlands Police. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Helen. Welcome. And we also have Matthew Pound. He is Accenture Health and Public Service Associate Director and West Midlands Police Account Lead. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Matthew. Thank you for having us. So we are going to be talking about delivering data-driven insights to the West Midlands Police Force. Helen, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the West Midlands Police Force? How big is the force? And also, what were some of the challenges that you were grappling with prior to this initiative? Yes, certainly. So West Midlands Police is the second largest police force in the UK outside of the Metropolitan Police in London. We have in excess of 11,000 people work at West Midlands Police serving communities through across the Midlands region. So geographically, we're quite a big area as well as well as being population density having that at a high level. So the reason we sort of embarked on the data-driven insights platform, which was a huge change for us, was for a number of reasons. Namely, we had a lot of disparate data which was spread across a range of legacy systems that were many, many years old with some duplication of what was being captured and no single view for officers or support staff. Some of the access was limited. You had to be in an actual police building on a desktop computer to access it. Other information could only reach officers on the front line through a telephone call back to one of our enabling services where they would do a manual checkup and look at the information, then call the officers back and tell them what they needed to know. So it was a very long, laborious process and not very efficient. And we certainly weren't exploiting the data that we had in a very productive way. So it sounds like, as you're describing, an old, clunky system that needed a technological re-imagination. So what was the main motivation for making this shift? It was really about making us more efficient and more effective in how we do business. So certainly as an IT leader and some of our operational colleagues, we recognize the benefits that data analytics could bring in a policing environment, not something that was really done in the UK at the time. We have a lot of data. So we're very data-rich in the information that we have, but we needed to turn it into information that was actionable. So that's where we started looking for technology partners and suppliers to help us and sort of help us really with what's the art of the possible. This hasn't been done before. So what could we do in this space that's appropriate for policing? Helen, I love that idea. What is the art of the possible? Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose AWS? I think really, as with all things, when we're procuring a partner in the public sector, there are many rules and regulations quite rightly as you would expect there to be because we're spending public money. So we have to be very, very careful and it's a long process and we have to be open to public scrutiny. So we sort of looked at everything that was available as part of that process, but we recognize the benefits that cloud would provide in this space because without moving to a cloud environment, we would literally be replacing something that was legacy with something that was a bit more modern. That's not what we wanted to do. Our ambition was far greater than that. So I think in terms of AWS, really it was around scalability, interoperability, things like the disaster recovery service, the fact that we can scale up and down quickly. We call it dialing up and dialing back. It's page go. So it just sort of ticked all the boxes for us and then we went through the full procurement process. Fortunately, it came out on top for us. So we were able to move forward, but it just sort of had everything that we were looking for in that space. Matthew, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here. How are you working with the West Midlands Police? Sorry, and helping them implement this cloud-first journey. Yeah, so I guess our journey with West Midlands Police started over five years ago now. So we set up a partnership with the force and wanted to operate in a way that was very different to a traditional supplier relationship. So through that, the Data Difference Insights Program is one of many that we've been working with West Midlands on over the last five years. As Helen said already, cloud gave a number of advantages, certainly from a big data perspective and the things that that enabled us to be. And from an extensive perspective, that allowed us to bring in a number of the different teams that we have, so cloud teams, security teams, interactive from a design perspective, as well as the more traditional services that people would associate with Accenture. I mean, so much of this is about embracing comprehensive change to experiment and innovate and try different things. Matthew, how do you help an entity like West Midlands Police think differently when there are these ways of doing things that people are used to? How do you help them think about what is the art of the possible, as Helen said? There's a few things for that. What's been critical is trying to code create solutions together. There's no point just turning up with what we think is the right answer, trying to collectively work through the issues that the force are seeing and the outcomes they're looking to achieve rather than simply focusing on a long list of requirements that think was critical. And then being really open to working together to create the right solution, rather than just trying to pick something off the shelf that maybe doesn't fit the force's requirements in the way that it should do. Right, it's not always a one-size-fits-all. Absolutely not. What was critical is making sure that we're creating something that met the force's needs in terms of the outcomes they're looking to achieve, the financial envelopes that were available and how we can deliver those in a iterative agile way rather than spending years and years working towards an outcome that has gone out of date before you even get there. So Helen, how are things different? What kinds of business functions and processes have been reimagined in light of this change and this shift? It's actually unrecognizable now in certain areas of the business as it was before. So just to give you a little bit of context, when we started working with Accenture and AWS on the Data and Insights program, it was very much around providing what was called locally a whizzy tool for our intelligence analysts to interrogate data, look at data, decide whether they could do anything predictive with it. And it was very much sort of a back office function to sort of tidy things up for us and make us a bit better in that area or a lot better in that area. And it was rolled out to a number of offices, a small number on the front line. And really it was in line with the mobility strategy that we had where officers were getting new smartphones for the first time to do sort of a lot of things on policing apps and things like that to again to avoid them having to keep driving back to police stations, et cetera. And the pilot was so successful, every officer now has access to this data on their mobile devices. So it literally went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do sort of clever whiz bang things to every officer in the force being able to access that level of data at their fingertips literally. So what they would have to have done before is if they needed to check an address or check details of an individual, just as one example, they would either have to, in many cases, go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer, or they would have to make a call back to a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions, either wait for the answer or wait for a callback with the answer when those people are doing the data interrogation manually. So the biggest change for us is the self-service nature of the data we now have available. So officers can do it themselves on their phone wherever they might be. So the efficiency savings from that point of view are immense. And I think just parallel to that is the quality of our data because we had a lot of data, but just because you've got a lot of data and a lot of information doesn't mean it's big data and it's valuable necessarily. So again, it was having the single source of truth as we call it. So you know that when you are completing those searches and getting the responses back, that it is the most accurate information we hold. And also you're getting it back within minutes as opposed to half an hour, an hour or a drive back to a station. So it's making officers more efficient and it's also making them safer. The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend out with the public doing what they, you know, we all should be doing. And have you seen that kind of return on investment? Because what you were just describing with all the steps that would needed to be taken in prior to this to verify and address say, and those are precious seconds when someone's life is on the line in sort of in the course of everyday police work. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It's difficult to put a price on it. It's difficult to quantify, but all the, you know, the minutes here and there certainly add up to a significant amount of efficiencies savings. And we've certainly been able to demonstrate the officers are spending less time at police stations as a result and more time out on the frontline. Also they're safer because they can get information about what may or may not be out and address, what may or may not have occurred in an area before very, very quickly without having to wait. Matthew, I want to hear your observations of working so closely with this West Midlands Police. Have you noticed anything about changes in its culture, in its operating model, in how police officers interact with one another? Have you seen any changes since this technology change? I think what's unique about the West Midlands Police is the buy-in from the top. You know, from the chief and his exact team and Helen is the leader from an IT perspective. The entire force is brought in to what is a significant change program and that trickles through everyone in the organization. Change is difficult and there's an awful lot of time effort that's been put into both the technical delivery and the business change and adoption aspects around each of the projects. But you can see the step change that it's making in each aspect of the organization and where that's putting West Midlands Police as a leader in the technology I'm policing in the UK and I think likely. And this is a question for both of you because Matthew, as you said, change is difficult and there is always a certain intransigence in workplaces about this is just the way we've always done things and we're used to this and don't try to get us to do anything new here. It works. How do you get the buy-in that you need to do this kind of digital transformation? I think it would be wrong to say it was easy. And we also have to bear in mind that this was one program in a five-year program. So there was a lot of change going on, both internally for some of our back office functions as well as frontline officers. So with DDI in particular, I think that the step change occurred when people could see what it could do for them. You know, we had lots of workshops and seminars where we all talk about, you know, it's big data and it's going to be great and it's data analytics and it's transformational, you know, and quite rightly people that are very busy doing a day job that not necessarily are technologists in the main and, you know, particularly interesting, quite rightly so in what we are not doing with the cloud, you know, and it was like, yeah, okay, it's one more thing. And then when they started to see it on their phones and what teams could do, that's when it started to sell itself. And I think that's when we started to see, you know, to see the step change. You know, and if we have any issues now, it's literally, you know, our help desks in meltdown because everyone's like, well, we can't manage without this anymore. And I think that speaks for itself. So it doesn't happen overnight. It's sort of incremental changes and then that's the step-changing attitude. And when they see it working and they see the benefits, they want to use it more. And that's how it's become fundamental to our policing by itself really without much selling. Matthew, Helen just made a compelling case for how to get buy-in. Have you discovered any other best practices when you are trying to get everyone on board for this kind of thing? We've used a lot of the traditional techniques, things around comms and engagement. We've also used things like 30 day challenge and nudge theory around how can we gradually encourage people to use things. I think there's a point with all of this around how do we just keep it simple and keep it user-centric from an end user perspective? I think DDI is a great example of where the technology is incredibly complex. The solution itself is extremely large and has been very difficult to get delivered. But at the heart of it is a very simple front-end for the user to encourage it and take that complexity away from them. I think that's been critical through the whole piece of DDI. One final word from Helen. I want to hear, where do you go from here? What is the long-term vision? I know that this has made productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time officers. What's next? I think really it's around exploiting what we've got. And I use the phrase quite a lot, dialing it up, which drives my technical architects crazy. But because it's apparently not that simple. But we've been through significant change in the last five years and we are still continuing to bed all of those changes into everyday operational policing. But what we need to see now is we need to exploit and build on the investments that we've made. In terms of data and cloud specifically, the next step really is about expanding our pool of data and our functions so that we keep getting better and better at this. And the more we do, the more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions. We're always being expected to, again, look after the public purse and do more for less. And I think this is certainly, and our cloud journey and cloud-first by design, which is where we are now, is helping us to be future-proofed. So for us, it's very much an investment. And I see now that we have got it embedded in operational policing. For me, this is the start of our journey, not the end. So it's really exciting to see where we can go from here. Exciting times indeed. Thank you so much, Lily, Helen and Matthew for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And you are watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS re-invent Accenture Executive Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight.