By Sally Watson, 16 July 1999 03:00
NEWS West Yorkshire police have installed a tailored knowledge management system from Computasoft Consulting. The Contingency and Operational Planning System (Cops) is designed to replace paper manuals and files for office-based operations. It allows information to be updated across the region to all departments and offices in real-time. Mel Gosliga, a consultant at Computasoft who helped design the system, said: "It provides a categorised view of contingency and operational plans of action for any given type of incident. It's also an authoring tool, so divisional commanders can write documents in Cops from their desktops." Inspector David Cosstick, responsible for contingency and operational planning at Killingbeck, Leeds, said the force began preparing for the system two years ago. "Nobody likes new technology," he said, "but once they see how easy it is to use, it gets better. The system is very user-friendly. "People still tend to rely on a lot of paper copy for meetings, but the advantage is that should something go wrong, any of our colleagues can look up all the information and details to find out what is happening." Gosliga said a browser-based application was originally investigated for the front-end, but the force eventually chose Lotus Notes. "Notes offers better security than a browser, and all the divisions already had Notes," he said.
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