Minerva is a collaboration of currently 23 UK Police Forces that use the Niche RMS as their primary records management system. Historically each Force implemented the system independently, resulting in each deployment being slightly different with different modules utilised and often configured differently.
The Minerva vision describes a future where:
— police forces across the UK are operating on a super-resilient and secure information technology allowing officers to gain instant access to high quality intelligence and operational information that has no geographical constraints,
— information freely flows between forces,
— officers are able to be efficiently deployed across borders,
— physical resources are better utilised across neighbouring forces, such as custody suites,
— collaboration is simplified,
— greater value for money when spending on technology,
— police forces able to focus on policing,
— innovation is better exploited.
To achieve this vision a 6-year plan has been approved by Minerva Forces, which requires Forces to cluster into Hubs, such as that already implemented in the East Midlands and City of London and the North West Tri Force collaboration and move from the current 17 platforms the 23 Forces are working from to 6-7 Hubs. Each hub will have a very similar build and configuration that will facilitate the ability to converge to a single database, build and configuration externally hosted, or the ability for each Force to access other Forces data through a Hub to Hub interNiche solution.
In addition an increased Minerva delivery team is being created to take over responsibility for the development of new functionality moving forward utilising a development environment being deployed by Niche Technologies. This team will have responsibility for all Requests for Change (RFC) from writing the specification requirements, getting national sign off, liaising with Niche Technologies and then testing for readiness for a first force to implement