A good contractor could have this solved in a week

[DimPrawn]

Crime computer has 1.2m records missing: Pre-1995 offences are stored only on microfiche | Mail Online

A backlog of 1.2million criminal records that have not been logged on to the Police National Computer was last night branded a ‘ticking time bomb’.

The details of convictions which date from before 1995 are still stored on an antiquated microfiche system.
To access a file, officers must pay a £100 fee to the police quango the National Policing Improvement Agency.



Ignoring the fact that the police have to pay some vile quango £100 to access what must be their own data, 1.2m records is nothing, a few Bobs in India could key these into a database and the database wouldn't exactly be the most complex IT system in the world to get round this.

Jeez, this must be a hangover from a New Labour policy.

[DimPrawn]

PS.

Although a good contractor could solve this in a week, I'd estimate 2 years work for budgetry purposes.

[TimberWolf]

One man (and his Bobs) might manage it in a week, but for a large software company with its multilayers of management, red tape and clingers-on, this would be an enormous undertaking. And jolly expensive too when you factor in feck-ups and creaming off the top.

[MarillionFan]

Shall we pitch for it?

Spacecadet can do the database. I'll do the Crystal Reports and Churchill can be project manager and tell people to
**** off.

Sorted

[EternalOptimist]

I'm in. I'll provide the glamour

[MarillionFan]

I'm in. I'll provide the glamour

Who else do we need?

Cojak as BA
Mich to do the testing
Mary Poppins to make the tea?

[alreadypacked]

Who else do we need?

Cojak as BA
Mich to do the testing
Mary Poppins to make the tea?

MF run, run now!

[Platypus]

I'll do the Powerpoints

[RichardCranium]

The database already exists; it is merely either an OCR job or a re-keying job. Either way it gets outsourced to Bobs, or possibly Chans.

I suspect the reason it has never been done is because they were frightened of the transcription errors.

Now get yourself into a public sector mindset: all paranoia, arse-covering and work evasion. Then look at the following and decide if you want the gig. It describes a very simplified but typical RichardCranium project.

PNC DATA LOAD PROGRAMME - RISK LOG AT PROGRAMME CLOSURE, 1st APR 1995

Risk 711
Description:
There is a risk that microfiche data may not be OCR'd properly, resulting in us being sued for making wrong decisions based on wrong data.
Mitigation: have the data manually keyed into the new system.
Update: Programme Board Executive (an IT Director) refuses to have data re-keyed as this is supposed to be an IT project.
Mitigation: make the microfiche data available by providing microfiche readers.
Update: no training budget exists to provide microfiche readere training. H&S Officer says microfiche readers count as Display Screens so DSE Equipment Regulations apply so training must be given before readers can be used.
Mitigation: outsource reading of microfiche to external organisarion.
Update: outsourcing of reading microfiche approved. Project MoneyWasteMentalist instigated.

Project MoneyWasteMentalist - Project Mandate - 1st Apr 1997

Description:
Make it possible for investigating officers to have someone read to them what the relevant microfiche says.
* Update: and use this as an opportunity to 'downsize' the Force's library service and free up their office space by getting rid of their old kit like those old screen things.

Project MoneyWasteMentalist - Project Closure Report - 1st April 1999

Solution as implemented:
Investigating officer wants to know if data exists prior to 1995.
Investigating officer fills in a form requesting a search is done to see if data exists. Funding is sought and approved for the search.
The search is eventually done by Bobs or Chans and it comes back with the results of whether there is data.
Investigating officer fills in a form requesting the data. Funding is sought and approved for the request.
The Data is sought by a Bob or a Chan and it is returned.
Repeat until the right data is found and returned.


A post-project, uncontrolled, undocumented, subsequent enhancement:
Sergeant Fred Bloggs & team go through all the microfiches and produce an index of what records exist. This saves £17.4m per year because now the initial search is not required. Unfortunately, this only exists on card index. Unfortunately, the cards are now falling to bits. Unfortunately, Sergeant Fred Bloggs has been at home off sick on full pay since 2007 ever since his bicycle fell over and he hurt his little finger. Unfortunately, someone else in another department is running a project to scan the cards and put them onto microfiche and outsource the reading of them.


Challenges:
The microfiches themselves were scanned and put onto CDs and destroyed (filed away safely and lost, actually). These CDs are now on some foreign format of DVDs are now the property of Data Rekey Services, Taiwan. They are labelled and indexed in a hanzi representation of Urdu. The bilingual Urdu / Mandarin operators have a very high turnover of staff. It is suspected one of the DVDs does not work any more as no data ever comes up for anyone whose name is in the range Egbertson to Filingsworth or the period May to August 1992. None of the departments responsible for the original projects or programmes exist any more. Nor do any of the staff. No data structure definitions exist. There is no documentation for the source system at all. Nobody knows why these COBOL ISAM records were ever printed out and put onto microfiche in the first place, nor when the printout was actually done. The 1.2 million records are actually 1.2 million scanned sheets of music-ruled 132x66 character paper. They are sorted by date of last update and indexed by the time and date they were scanned in, in HHMMSSDDMMM format.


Status as at January 2011... it's in the papers ... something MUST be seen to be done...

Step 1: there is no funding authorised for a project manager for this project. As the new project manager you will need to arrange and gain approval for that funding before timesheets can be submitted...

[Churchill]

The database already exists; it is merely either an OCR job or a re-keying job. Either way it gets outsourced to Bobs, or possibly Chans.

I suspect the reason it has never been done is because they were frightened of the transcription errors.

Now get yourself into a public sector mindset: all paranoia, arse-covering and work evasion. Then look at the following and decide if you want the gig. It describes a very simplified but typical RichardCranium project.

PNC DATA LOAD PROGRAMME - RISK LOG AT PROGRAMME CLOSURE

Risk 711
Description:
There is a risk that microfiche data may not be OCR'd properly, resulting in us being sued for making wrong decisions based on wrong data.
Mitigation: have the data manually keyed into the new system.
Update: Programme Board Executive (an IT Director) refuses to have data re-keyed as this is supposed to be an IT project.
Mitigation: make the microfiche data available by providing microfiche readers.
Update: no training budget exists to provide microfiche readere training. H&S Officer says microfiche readers count as Display Screens so DSE Equipment Regulations apply so training must be given before readers can be used.
Mitigation: outsource reading of microfiche to external organisarion.
Update: outsourcing of reading microfiche approved. Project MoneyWasteMentalist instigated.

Project MoneyWasteMentalist - Project Mandate

Description:
Make it possible for investigating officers to have someone read to them what the relevant microfiche says.
* Update: and use this as an opportunity to 'downsize' the Force's library service and free up their office space by getting rid of their old kit like those old screen things.


Solution as implemented:

Investigating officer wants to know if data exists prior to 1995.
Investigating officer fills in a form requesting a search is done to see if data exists. Funding is sought and approved for the search.
The search is eventually done by Bobs or Chans and it comes back with the results of whether there is data.
Investigating officer fills in a form requesting the data. Funding is sought and approved for the request.
The Data is sought by a Bob or a Chan and it is returned.
Repeat until the right data is found and returned.

Subsequent enhancement:
Sergeant Fred Bloggs & team go through all the microfiches and produce an index of what records exist. This saves £17.4m per year because now the initial search is not required. Unfortunately, this only exists on card index. Unfortunately, the cards are now falling to bits. Unfortunately, Sergeant Fred Bloggs has been at home off sick on full pay since 2007 ever since his bicycle fell over and he hurt his little finger. Unfortunately, someone else in another department is running a project to scan the cards and put them onto microfiche and outsource the reading of them.


Challenges:
The microfiches themselves were scanned and put onto CDs and destroyed (filed away safely and lost, actually). These CDs are now on some foreign format of DVDs are now the property of Data Rekey Services, Taiwan. They are labelled and indexed in a hanzi representation of Urdu. The bilingual Urdu / Mandarin operators have a very high turnover of staff. It is suspected one of the DVDs does not work any more as no data ever comes up for anyone whose name is in the range Egbertson to Filingsworth or the period May to August 1992. None of the departments responsible for the original projects or programmes exist any more. Nor do any of the staff. No data structure definitions exist. There is no documentation for the source system at all. Nobody knows why these COBOL ISAM records were ever printed out and put onto microfiche in the first place, nor when the printout was actually done.


Step 1: there is no funding authorised for a project manager for this project. You will need to arrange and gain approval for that funding before timesheets can be submitted.