INCIS

Last updated

INCIS was the name of the Integrated National Crime Information System designed to provide information to the New Zealand Police in the 1990s, but which was abandoned in 1999. Although the project was abandoned parts of its hardware and software infrastructure are still in use today.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Origins and history

INCIS was an ambitious project with origins dating back to project Serious Incident Computer Application (SICA) in April 1985, and the National Intelligence System (NIS) project in January 1991. The aim of INCIS was to support operational policing in New Zealand by providing improved information, investigation and analysis capabilities. The belief was that ultimately crime prevention strategies would minimise the incidence and effects of crime on the community. The New Zealand Police developed the INCIS Business Case, which was presented to government in July 1993. The project had a large information technology component. Its prime contractor was IBM, who were to deliver technical infrastructure and 3500 desktop computers. Originally the intended desktop was OS/2 but later was revised to use Windows NT.

Project Team

The INCIS Project Team went through many changes throughout its life. In 1991 the initial team consisted of senior New Zealand Police personnel plus Martyn Carr (Project Manager) and David Cittadini (Technology Architect), then senior consultants with Price Waterhouse New Zealand. This team completed an initial review of INCIS and lead the project through the initial Scoping Study, the Business Case, the Request for Information (RFI), Request for Tender (RFT) and initial Business Plan stages. This team lead the project up to the point before IBM was selected as the prime contractor. During this time Martyn Carr and David Cittadini left Price Waterhouse to form their own technology advisory company, called Sapphire Technology Limited (Sapphire). In August 1994 Sapphire ceased to be engaged by the Police and Martyn Carr ceased to be Project Manager and David Cittadini ceased to be the Technology Architect. This action was taken so that uniformed police personnel could lead all major aspects of the project; this was seen to be very important by police senior management. This major change in key Project Team personnel took place before IBM was selected as the Prime Contractor. Sapphire provided a "warts and all" report detailing a number of significant business and technical risks with the INCIS project and recommended that these must resolved before Police committed to IBM and to the future of the INCIS Project. The Police Sponsor decided that these could be overcome during the project itself and the contract with IBM was duly signed on September 1994. By this time Police Superintendent Tony Crewdson was now Project Manager for the project. From this date onwards the INCIS Project Team continued to evolve and change considerably over the life of the project.

High risk project

At the time of inception, INCIS was a high risk project. Visits by managerial police staff to other law enforcement agencies, and other independent research over an extensive period, confirmed the view that the technology requirements for INCIS at that time had not been designed or implemented as an integrated system of sufficient standard to meet the needs of police, anywhere in the world.

Project cost

Excluding internal police costs within the INCIS project, the business case forecast expenditure for Infrastructure, applications and data conversion was NZD$84,860,000. By 31 March 1999, this had increased to NZD$94,710,000. The estimated total cost of the project is NZD$110,000,000.

Ministerial inquiry

An independent ministerial inquiry into INCIS, conducted by Dr Francis Small for the Minister of Justice, was completed in November 2000. It was commissioned by the government so that experience gained from the project could be published and used for the benefit of government agencies to successfully manage information technology projects in the future. [1]

Relationship with prime contractor (IBM)

The ministerial inquiry communicated to, and invited IBM to meet with the investigative team to supply information in accordance with the inquiry. IBM elected to decline this invitation to meet with the ministerial inquiry. A final draft of the ministerial report was sent to IBM in order to adhere to the laws of natural justice. The following quote is IBM's written response after receiving the final draft report.

Thank you for your letter of 28 July 2000 and the opportunity to respond to the draft report of the Ministerial Inquiry into INCIS.
IBM has consistently taken the view that as the Ministerial Inquiry relates to the relationship between public agencies an active involvement would be inappropriate. Therefore, although IBM believes that a number of the assertions in the draft report which relate to IBM inevitably lack balance, it does not wish to become substantively involved at this stage. IBM therefore declines the opportunity to comment on the contents of the draft report.

Future projects

To date, the New Zealand government has not funded any software engineering project as large as INCIS. The State Services Commission now monitors any information technology project involving capital investment of seven million dollars or more in any one year as a result of the ministerial inquiry.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Hat</span> Computing services company

Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.

Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.

Leidos Holdings, Inc., formerly known as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), is an American defense, aviation, information technology, and biomedical research company headquartered in Reston, Virginia, that provides scientific, engineering, systems integration, and technical services. Leidos merged with Lockheed Martin's IT sector, Information Systems & Global Solutions, in August 2016 to create the defense industry’s largest IT services provider. The Leidos-Lockheed Martin merger is one of the biggest transactions thus far in the consolidation of the defense sector. Leidos contracts extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community, as well as other U.S. government agencies and select commercial markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project manager</span> Professional in the field of project management

A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any undertaking that has a defined scope, defined start and a defined finish; regardless of industry. Project managers are first point of contact for any issues or discrepancies arising from within the heads of various departments in an organization before the problem escalates to higher authorities, as project representative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IDEF</span> Family of modeling languages

IDEF, initially an abbreviation of ICAM Definition and renamed in 1999 as Integration Definition, is a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering. They cover a wide range of uses from functional modeling to data, simulation, object-oriented analysis and design, and knowledge acquisition. These definition languages were developed under funding from U.S. Air Force and, although still most commonly used by them and other military and United States Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, are in the public domain.

Business software is any software or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, measure productivity, and perform other business functions accurately.

Te Manatū WakaMinistry of Transport is the public service department of New Zealand charged with advising the New Zealand Government on transport policy. The Ministry works closely with other government transport partners, including the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to advance their strategic objectives.

Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as on-demand software, web-based software, or web-hosted software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Building information modeling</span> Process used to design and document building and infrastructure designs

Building information modeling (BIM) is a process involving the generation and management of digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of buildings and other physical assets. BIM is supported by various tools, technologies and contracts. Building information models (BIMs) are computer files which can be extracted, exchanged or networked to support decision-making regarding a built asset. BIM software is used by individuals, businesses and government agencies who plan, design, construct, operate and maintain buildings and diverse physical infrastructures, such as water, refuse, electricity, gas, communication utilities, roads, railways, bridges, ports and tunnels.

International Business Machines (IBM) is a multinational corporation specializing in computer technology and information technology consulting. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, the company originated from the amalgamation of various enterprises dedicated to automating routine business transactions, notably pioneering punched card-based data tabulating machines and time clocks. In 1911, these entities were unified under the umbrella of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BIRT Project</span> Open source software project

The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an open source software project that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for rich client and web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. BIRT is a top-level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Cittadini</span> New Zealanad businessman and technologist

David Cittadini was an important technologist in the New Zealand business market in the 1990s. He was involved in creating and leading a number of important technology developments within New Zealand, such as Object-oriented programming and Distributed object computing. He was a member of a number of New Zealand technology-related standard groups and was involved in a number of international standard bodies, such as the Object Management Group, and was an energetic proponent of leading-edge approaches and technologies in New Zealand.

Concentrix is an American business services company specializing in customer engagement and business performance. Concentrix was a subsidiary of SYNNEX Corporation since 2006 and went public as an independent company on December 1, 2020. Concentrix is headquartered in Fremont, California.

GenevaERS is an enterprise reporting system that currently executes in the IBM mainframe z/OS environment. It is similar to MapReduce or Apache Spark but predates their development by a decade. It has been used as a data warehousing ETL, reporting, and application development platform. It was designed to support business systems using William McCarthy's theory of Resources, Events, Agents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Data Systems</span> American information technology company

Electronic Data Systems (EDS) was an American multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Plano, Texas, which was founded in 1962 by Ross Perot. The company was a subsidiary of General Motors from 1984 until it was spun off in 1996. EDS was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2008.

Cloud collaboration is a method of sharing and co-authoring computer files via cloud computing, whereby documents are uploaded to a central "cloud" for storage, where they can then be accessed by other users. Cloud collaboration technologies allow users to upload, comment and collaborate on documents and even amend the document itself, evolving the document. Businesses in the last few years have increasingly been switching to use of cloud collaboration.

Cyber Security and Information Systems Information Analysis Center (CSIAC) is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) Information Analysis Center (IAC) sponsored by the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). The CSIAC is a consolidation of three predecessor IACs: the Data & Analysis Center for Software (DACS), the Information Assurance Technology IAC (IATAC) and the Modeling & Simulation IAC (MSIAC), with the addition of the Knowledge Management and Information Sharing technical area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM</span> American multinational technology corporation

International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.

Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.

The information and communications technology industry in New Zealand is a rapidly growing sector. The technology sector overall employs over 120,000 people, and technology is New Zealand's third largest export sector, accounting for $8.7 billion of exports, with information technology creating 50,000 full time jobs, and about $1 billion in IT services exports.

References

  1. Bingham, Eugene (30 June 2000). "Fears of $7m bill for Incis inquiry". The New Zealand Herald . Retrieved 12 April 2017.