I don’t know for sure but I speculate there’s another factor behind the M9 crash last week and Police Scotland’s handling of it. It relates to a point Lesley Riddoch touched on in the Scotsman today: centralising the Scottish force and, more importantly, the resources it uses to manage operations.I’m prepared to go along for now with the idea that an overarching body has its place in modern policing. What concerns me though is that the processes it relies on in practice haven’t been fully thought through.
Like Lesley, I’m concerned about the national control centres, effectively call-centres, their structure and procedures. I fear the shift from local control centres brought with it underlying aspects of call-centre operations. Simply grafting on existing call-handling technologies to meet police requirements leaves ample scope for communication failures like the tragedy we’ve just witnessed.
I work in the call-handling business and, in its early days, had some involvement with its development. I understand the principles call-centres are based on. I also understand, first hand, how far from them actual practice has drifted. In the case of Police Scotland, of course, it’s in all our interests to be as close to the ideal and as far from anything that compromises best practice.
In the call-centre world, the basic tools are technological. Computer equipment and infrastructure are vitally important. On top of that, software tools are used to actually deal with calls and process them into other active systems.
In commerce, software links customers, their histories buying goods and services with data about goods or services themselves and with detailed case management. In my experience, even when development costs hundreds of millions of pounds, software solutions will be adaptations of existing solutions, modified and integrated with each other and what is already there.
For the police service, I worry their call-handling has been adapted like this and plugged into older control centre resources, leaving operational gaps. If, as I’ve found, system capabilities can be underused because of such gaps then communication becomes an inefficient mix of old methods and new, far worse, in the end, than the inadequacies of either used alone.
For example, a core call-handling system I’ve used has a method of linking all contacts and call handlers with each other so information can be electronically transferred to individuals and groups. It doesn’t interface with other resources (because they were never originally designed to). The result is some information transfers are still done on paper, passed up and down management lines depending on circumstances. Some resources permit notation or flagging but not in a way that transfers it to others where it would be useful. Cross-notation is a matter for the call-handler actively transferring or copying information. Every step like this adds a corresponding risk of information being copied inaccurately or not being copied at all.
Systems like this usually provide coding lists to categorise queries so they are completed quickly and automatically routed. This, though, relies on well thought out categories. In my experience, this is a challenge rarely risen to and codes are inadequate. They seldom describe reality and are too often entered for the closest fit. Vital information is lost through never being identified as vital from the start.
Finally, the call-centre ethos is one which plays up ideas of good communication, effectiveness and accuracy. Sadly, that renders down to an underlying target culture crippled by a need for speed and volume in handling calls. For the police service, it’s vital to effectively clear incoming calls so no-one is left in a potentially disastrous situation but if the pace of clearing calls interferes with clarity the same disastrous situation (as we’ve seen) can be misunderstood or ignored until it’s too late.
In my view, the technology we have is more than adequate for local control centres to operate close to their own operations and provide a seamless connection into the nationwide network. What it takes is a rethink of the worst aspects of centralised thinking most call-centres use. The original concept and some of those who were at its heart back in the nineties was one based on notions of self-regulating teams with the technology and software developed to facilitate their actions and keep them securely connected to the whole.
For me that speaks of localised call centres working with a real knowledge of their patch, organising and developing in that context with the technology to work together and with other parts of the wider network. It then becomes an intelligent and responsive system rather than one driven by an impetus to clear calls in hope that nothing goes missing along the way.
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