Police IT Organisation

NetOp stays on the right side of the law.

PITO, the Police Information Technology Organisation, provides technology, communications systems and services to the police, and other criminal justice organisations within the United Kingdom. PITO also has a role in the purchasing of goods and services for the police with the aim of providing best value through collective procurement. A non-departmental public body, PITO is funded by grant in aid from central Government and by charges for the services the organization provides.

The organisation employs approximately 500 staff across two locations, Blackfriars on the Southbank in London and Hendon, at the police training college in North West London. The IT department consists of 13 staff in total, eight of whom are responsible for fixing PC problems.

The Need
Karl Pilgrim, IT Support and Development Manager, was finding that his department was inundated with calls from PITO staff. IT support felt that they needed a strategic way to deal with lower priority technical issues that could be easily solved and let the IT staff concentrate on more important, strategic matters. Getting a remote diagnostic tool was particularly important as PITO has two separate sites. Staff often had to travel between the different locations to resolve issues, which meant they could exceed their Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The Solution
PITO decided that a remote control system was needed. Karl Pilgrim explains: “We looked at a number of different remote control solutions, but after being given a demo version of NetOp, there was no comparison and we decided to run with that.”

NetOp Remote Control was chosen for a number of reasons, but most attractive to PITO’s IT team is the ability to restrict access to key staff only. The organisation has restricted access to the remote control solution to two key administrators.

Pilgrim continues: “We’re particularly impressed with NetOp’s ability to encrypt data, set passwords and everything else needed for connectivity. It is a lot faster with the screen refreshes than the other remote control products we have tried.”

The Benefits
The benefits of installing NetOp at PITO are considerable. On a day-to-day basis, the solution is used to log onto the servers at PITO’s two sites. It enables the IT staff to work remotely to carry out routine maintenance, such as resetting accounts or solving technical glitches. Individual workstations can be quickly and easily connected to, and small problems fixed remotely. This removes the need for someone to be physically at the machine with the fault.

Karl Pilgrim confirms: “NetOp has helped us manage the large number of calls that we get from staff to the service desk. In particular, it means that we have streamlined the way we resolve lower grade calls for assistance from staff at our two sites. In turn, this has freed up staff to concentrate on more pressing issues and long-term planning to improve PITO’s IT network.”

NetOp enables the second-line support staff to remotely assess an individual workstation, look at the problem and provide a fix. If the problem cannot be diagnosed remotely, they will then brief one of the Technical Support Officers who will go out and usually complete the job within two to three hours.

Key features
“With the new version of NetOp, you have the ability to run an inventory scan on a remote workstation. Although we are not actually taking full advantage of this new feature at the moment, I know that it will prove very useful to us,” states Karl Pilgrim. “The ‘wake on LAN’ feature is also really helpful. We will receive a request from a user telling us that they have a problem with their workstation and then they will switch off their PC and go home! What we are then able to do is wake up the workstation, work on it and fix the problem. When the member of staff comes into the office in the morning, the problem is fixed!”

Future Use
At present, NetOp provides PITO’s IT staff with all the functionality to meet their immediate needs. But Pilgrim suggests that there may be the possibility of using NetOp within its training facility in the near future. By utilising NetOp’s sister product - called NetOp School - PITO can enhance its PC-based training. Designed to make computer-based teaching more effective and using advanced remote-control technology, NetOp School allows tutors to demonstrate to, monitor and control student PC’s without moving from their own, whether that be in a physical classroom or a virtual one.

At present neither of the two sites have any training facility installed on the workstations. “Once we have installed Windows XP here, we will start giving training to users and one of the best ways of moving this forward would be to use the NetOp training package.”

For more information about PITO, please visit www.pito.org.uk