Business Problem

Our customer for this chapter is a regional police service with several thousand employees serving a metropolitan region. As with any large organization in the government sector, many stakeholders have an interest in their activities, including the public, the municipal government, and the police services board. They are continually challenged by the need to do more with less budget, which has led to a renewed focus on their strategic direction.

Problem Statement

The police service is looking for new and innovative ways to manage the service from many different dimensions to satisfy the different stakeholders and has been having difficulty aligning all the departments and initiatives around their strategic plan. Although they have a data warehouse and have started to build some reports that describe the types and frequency of crimes that are occurring, this is not sufficient to really effect change across the police service.

This has led to the following problems:

• Although management has spent a great deal of effort creating a comprehensive strategy for the police service, there is a lack of understanding across the organization of how the strategy applies to their particular job.

• Currently, no standard way to measure performance exists in the various key areas identified in the strategy, so it is difficult to establish whether meaningful improvements are being made.