Intranet Case Study

South Wales Police is the largest police force in Wales and although geographically small, covering around 812 square miles and equating to just 10% of the geographical area of Wales, South Wales Police provides a policing service to 1.3 million people (42% of the country’s population). South Wales is a diverse region, boasting urban, rural and coastal areas and featuring the two largest cities in Wales – Swansea and the capital city, Cardiff. The force also serves 63 of the 100 most deprived communities in Wales.

The force has almost 3000 police officers and over 2200 police staff, including Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and a team of dedicated volunteers that includes over 100 Special Constables and around 150 Police Youth Volunteers.

Find out more about South Wales Police

The challenge

To implement a new intranet that will replace an existing site that is no longer fit for purpose. The new intranet will enable more interactivity, increase employee engagement and facilitate the organisation’s move to remote and mobile working. It must be well structured, simple to use, with outstanding search capabilities and be easy to navigate.

As well as supporting corporate communication requirements, the intranet should enable the South Wales Police Digital Services team to deliver more business processes online.

The solution

The new Engage Intranet at South Wales Police was launched as part of a force wide programme of digital transformation. The site is called ‘Bob’, after Sir Robert Peel who founded the Police Force. Bob, which won the SORCE award for ‘Best intranet of the year’ is an exciting site that is feature rich, engaging and dynamic.

“Our new intranet Bob, sits very firmly within Digital Services, a team which is purely customer focused and led. Our vision is to transform policing through digital technology.”

Darren Phillips
Transformation Officer

Bob is used by over 5,000 people at South Wales Police, of which over 300 are regularly adding content to the site. Heavy use of group targeting ensures that users only see content that is relevant to them, based upon their assigned roles.

“We are up to nearly 500 groups that we actively target. We proactively push out information to people based upon the roles they are assigned to. All our contact information comes directly from our HR system, it self-populates four times a day ensuring information is always up to date. Sorce have been extremely supportive of us pulling information from external systems and allowing us to extend the Engage product which has been great.”

Darren Phillips
Transformation Officer

South Wales Police have an extensive programme of work based around digitizing paper forms for self-service. They have built, 60 to 70 forms, all of which have workflow behind them. They are all searchable from within the intranet.

Contact searching is hugely powerful for South Wales Police due to the size and complexity of their workforce. Their contact searches have been enhanced to enable users to run searches for roles such as ‘Cardiff Officer’ which then returns all Police Officers from the Cardiff stations.

“Searching for teams has proven really useful, users can search for the ‘ICT Helpdesk’ and be presented with all the appropriate contact details. We’ve tweaked the search quite a bit to suit our needs to give us what we now consider very accurate results.”

Nick Allport
Lead Developer

Quicklinks are a great way of enabling users to link off to useful systems and resources quickly and easily, there are 150 for people to choose from. Quicklinks are a simple but highly effective way of saving time and increasing efficiency.

Microblogging is a powerful tool for engagement at South Wales Police. People are posting lots of updates on the home page of Bob for both business and social purposes. Colleagues can comment on and ‘like’ posts which is great for employee engagement.

“Microblogs work really well for us. We’ve seen increased employee engagement since we’ve been using them. We found straight away that people were helping each other to find the answers to questions, sharing thoughts and discussing ideas.”

Nick Allport
Lead Developer

Video is being used extensively across Bob, the Chief Officers are getting involved and are adding video updates taken on their mobile phones to the site.

“We recently started doing live broadcasting on the intranet. We can do it from mobiles or cameras. The online screen broadcast is fantastic, the tool we use allows for real time texting or questions and answers. The whole organisation can watch a broadcast and give feedback.”

Nick Allport
Lead Developer

South Wales Police are using the Engage development environment to create lots of page items which display content within the intranet from other South Wales Police data sources. This has proven a great way to push information out to staff from disparate sources in an easy and consistent way.

Bob is supporting force wide initiatives, such as the ‘100things100days’ initiative, which involves implementing 100 business improvements in 100 days. A visual ‘Doneometer’ has been created, which shows the 100 improvement ideas, and shows progress against their implementation.

Team Spaces are used extensively, and created for collaborative groups, communities of practice and social clubs.

South Wales Police has chosen not to make the site fully multi-lingual but have instead created a ‘Welsh zone’ which holds content for Welsh speaking staff.

The results

Bob is used to successfully share vital communications across a large and complex workforce. Bob plays a huge part in helping to manage key business processes and launch online forms. Bob has already helped the organisation transform the way it communicates, including the introduction of interactive collaborative areas and video communications for the first time.

Download the full South Wales Police case study