Prestigious national IT award nomination for PNLD & PDMS FAQ project

PDMS and the Police National Legal Database (PNLD) team, with their FAQ project, have reached the shortlist for the Information Age Effective IT Awards (www.effectiveitawards.com). The Effective IT Awards are one of the UK’s most prestigious for users and implementers of IT. The Police National Frequently Asked Questions Database and Website project, established by PNLD, has made the final shortlist in the ‘Most effective use of IT in Public Service’ category. PDMS, as PNLD’s technology partners, used their Foundations ^TM technology platform to successfully meet PNLD’s requirements for the project.

The Information Age Effective IT Awards are designed to highlight the effective use of technology across a broad range of industries and across all company sizes. The emphasis is on rewarding projects that have not only helped save money, but that have delivered tangible benefits to the business in terms of improved business processes or enhanced capabilities. The FAQ project has been selected from over 400 entries which ranged from large multi-million pound projects to much smaller implementations of widely available technology.

Every week the police receive thousands of non-emergency calls from members of the public. Important as they are, these calls are time consuming and many of them will be questions about routine aspects of the criminal law and police procedures. Many of these questions will be repeated hundreds of times over – simply because members of the public have no other way of finding the relevant information.

To help resolve this issue, PNLD has compiled a database of initially more than 500 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for use by all Call Handlers in the 43 Forces in England and Wales. This database will increase over time. To ease the pressure still further, PNLD have opened the database directly to the public at www.askthepolice.co.uk.

The FAQ database will be an invaluable resource for staff of police call centres. It will save time, ensure more consistency in responses to the questions that are troubling callers and help to deliver vital time savings for front line police officers. As well as a wide selection of nationally asked questions, local Police Forces can provide their own regionally relevant information and FAQs to provide a local service to local people.

The winners will be announced at the Effective IT awards ceremony which will take place on the 23rd June 2005 in London.

For further information, please contact:

Joanne Pontée,

Or

Edward Rowan