Business Impact Article - Posted 5/27/2009

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PATB NI

Building a Better Way to Retrieve Information and Fight Crime with FAST Enterprise Search Platform

As one of the most respected law enforcement organizations in Germany, Polizeiamt für Technik und Beschaffung des Landes Niedersachsen (PATB NI) is responsible for keeping the citizens of Lower Saxony safe and secure. In the federal state of Lower Saxony, the police department sought to find a way to help its more than 18,000 police officers communicate with each other more effectively. The goals were to give those officers real-time access to critical information, assist them with collaborative crime initiatives, and track their daily activities and investigations. To achieve these objectives, Lower Saxony invested in the development and implementation of a new type of police information management system called NIVADIS. The hope was that, by giving police officers a single source for accessing information, the new NIVADIS system would help the department reduce administrative expenses, cut down on overhead, increase productivity, and minimize the lengthy investigation process. PATB NI commissioned Mummert Consulting, one of the most successful consultancies in Europe, to build the NIVADIS system.

Challenge

Lower Saxony’s police force houses massive amounts of information across a variety of databases and other sources—with upwards of 30 million to 40 million new documents being added each year. In building NIVADIS, Mummert chose BEA WebLogic to serve as a unified platform on which to integrate all of this information.

But integrating the data was just the beginning. To make the project a success and ensure the usefulness of the system, PATB NI knew that it had to give police officers the ability to quickly scan all of those sources and retrieve specific pieces of information. Otherwise, users would likely become frustrated if they were left to sort through countless records in search of the one piece of data they might be looking for in a given situation. Moreover, PATB NI knew that traditional database application search functions would not deliver the level of performance necessary to support the expected volume of daily inquires. They had to find an enterprise-class search technology.

PATB NI then began to map out all of the functions they were looking for in a search solution. At the top of the list was scalability. With so many new documents being added on an annual basis, the system had to be able to handle extreme growth without any degradation of performance. Reliability and accuracy were also a critical priority. Due to the sensitive nature of the data and the urgent circumstances under which such information is often being retrieved, the organization could not tolerate even a single document being lost or misplaced, as it could have a major impact on the course of an investigation or simply the rate of productivity.

Solution

For PATB NI, choosing the right enterprise search platform was an obvious decision—it selected FAST ESP. “Of those search technologies that we reviewed, FAST was the only vendor that could meet all of the requirements

Of those search technologies that we reviewed, FAST was the only vendor that could meet all of the requirements we had identified. But I think what impressed us most was FAST’s unique ability to scale to accommodate more than 200 million documents. We never would have expected a solution could provide this degree of robustness and availability. Alex Köhler Chief of Police, PATB NI

Beyond the system’s unprecedented scalability, there were other features and benefits that excited the PATB NI team as well. Most notably, there was the speed with which FAST technology can search through massive quantities of data—regardless of where the data sits or whether it is structured or unstructured in format. “The rate of speed with which our users can retrieve information is incredible,” commented Axel Köhler, Chief of Police, PATB NI. “Any officer can perform a search that returns an exact piece of information in a matter of seconds.”

Then, there was the accuracy and relevancy of the results. Prior to the selection of FAST, the team had created a wish list of highly advanced search capabilities and functions that their ideal solution would possess. FAST ESP included all of these features and more. Such capabilities included phonetic search, approximate search, and advanced-hit highlighting, as well as a host of other functions—all of which help to ensure that the results delivered to the end user are exactly the right ones. This was the type of functionality that would help create a positive end-user experience and ensure the long-term success of the NIVADIS project.

Benefits and Results

With FAST ESP at its core, the NIVADIS system gives police officers in Lower Saxony the power to perform more thorough investigations and drive department productivity to record levels by leveraging every available document in their police information management systems. This newfound level of efficiency has made the Lower Saxony police department a model for all of the other federal states.

For Lower Saxony, the implementation of FAST has breathed new life into the tens of millions of documents that were previously scattered throughout the organization. Now, every piece of information can be made available to aid in an investigation, to manage resources, and to gain insight into the state of operations. In addition, this ability to index and retrieve such vast quantities of information even helps the department comply with federal regulations. Personnel can search for a specific piece of information and, within seconds, find the data he or she needs in the case of an audit or any other compliance-related inquiry.

Most importantly, regardless of how many new documents are eventually added to the system, FAST ESP will continue to be able to span that content and still maintain the same level of performance. This is especially critical to the Lower Saxony department, which expects that its inventory of information will grow to approximately 200 million to 240 million documents over the next three years.

Finally, because of the robust nature of FAST ESP, PATB NI and its officers can be assured that the system will will deliver high availability, as FAST ESP was built to ensure the highest degree of fault tolerance and availability.

Why FAST?

PATB NI sought to make the NIVADIS system unlike any of the other systems deployed within Germany’s law enforcement organizations by providing true, enterprise-caliber search capabilities and best-in-class response times to its police officers. According to Axel Köhler, Chief of Police, PATB NI, “FAST was the only solution on the market to provide the capabilities that would allow us to turn that vision into a reality.”

For more information about FAST please visit:
www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch