Tasmania Police scores $46m to continue core systems overhaul

The Tasmanian government will set aside $46 million in the state’s 2020 budget to fund the next stage of Tasmania Police’s multi-year ‘Project Unify’ IT transformation.

Police, fire and emergency management minister Mark Shelton announced the four-year funding package on Wednesday ahead of the budget’s release next week.

The funding builds on an initial $13 million investment for Project Unify’s first stage in 2017-18, which was to be used to replace the agency’s significant number of disparate core systems.

That three-year stage was completed last year, and saw Tasmania Police roll out an initial version of a new commercial-off-the-shelf core policing system, called Atlas.

Atlas was delivered by Brisbane-based integrator Bdna and software vendor Niche Technology, and is understood to be the first Australian policing system hosted on protected-level Azure.

It replaced several legacy systems, including Tasmania Police’s 30-year-old information data management system, which involved migrating more than 128 million data records.

Shelton said the system had provided “improved access to criminal intelligence”, including through a new ‘search tool, called Compass.

The system also introduced a “new approach to the management of warrants, missing persons and searches”.

Shelton said the new funding would be used to deliver “an online crime reporting function where members of the public can use an online portal to report certain categories of crime”.

“The new functionality and integration will be across a range of operational areas including property management, family violence and crime management,” he added.