Australia’s law enforcement information-sharing agency CrimTrac has awarded a five-year, $20.9 million outsourcing contract to service provider Datacom to manage its top-secret IT systems.
CrimTrac went to market mid last year to replace an expired five-year, $25 million contract it signed with Logica in 2009 for the design and implementation of its “enterprise computing grade mission critical ICT environment”.
It asked for a partner to provide IT management services for its systems and infrastructure, which include some of the nation’s most sensitive law enforcement platforms.
The agency yesterday revealed it had appointed Datacom to take over support for its IT systems until January 2020.
CrimTrac collaborates with the country’s state and federal police and operates Australia’s DNA, ballistics and fingerprints databases, among others.
It supports an IT user base of around 500,000 state and federal police users alongside its own 220 staff.
Traditionally, CrimTrac has outsourced only limited services - such as server, storage and network management - to the private sector, while developing and managing platforms in-house.
Its new contract, however, expands the bundle of work to include design, project management and business-as-usual operation of its sensitive systems.
The agency said expanding its outsourcing operations would allow agency staff to be “re-tasked to higher value governance, strategy and contracts management activities”.
Over the past year one of the agency’s biggest priorities has been the debut of the Australian Ballistics Identification Network, which went live mid-last year.
The ABIN expands the IBIS Trax ballistics identification solution already used by NSW Police to all police forces across the country, allowing state, federal and international cops to access a database of weapons recovered by police and compare identifying details.
The agency is currently talking with providers about expanding its DNA capability to include kinship matching (connections of biological relationships) and familial searching (linking suspects not listed in a criminal database to a crime by accessing the DNA of a close relative).
CrimTrac expects to sign a contract for the technology and deliver the capabilities to police by mid-2015.
