Education
As a child I was dogged by asthma, eczema, hay fever and undiagnosed dyslexia. However, I did well in ‘A’ level maths and okay in ‘A’ level physics and in 1983 started a degree in computing and electronics () at Brighton Polytechnic.
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Given the government were paying my fees and part my maintenance grant I felt the need to work hard. I found other students who ‘dossed’ disrespectful of the opportunity they were given by the state.
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I worked extremely hard and, without realising at that point I was dyslexic, got a first class honours degree.
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Working Life – a career in Emergency Service IT
When looking for my first graduate job in IT (1987) I was attracted to something that would make a difference in the public sector. I would have had opportunities in The City, defence and the oil industry but I wanted to do something more public spirited. So, I accepted a job with CGS in West Drayton developing IT systems for the emergency services.
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The first project I was put on was the development of a crime recording system for Cleveland Police. It was already late and struggling. Fortunately Brighton Polytechnic had trained me well in the C programming language and the Unix operating system. It soon became clear, amongst a team of six that I was ahead of the game.
Once the development was complete it was clear that the system was full of bugs, very slow and not fit for purpose. Although late to the project I felt the need to be the person to sort it out. My father was a serving police officer and I think with that I saw it as my duty to sort the thing out. Working well beyond by grade and years, I fixed lots of deep seated bugs (normally causing the system to fail) and many performance issues. This included re-architecting it so all users did not access the database simultaneously. The system couldn’t take the record locking this required. Instead I rewrote it so record inserts, updates and deletions were queued such that the database didn’t have to deal with simultaneous amendments.
The project would have been scrapped if the work I did hadn’t been done. It stayed live until 1999 when it was replaced due to the millennium bug.
After this project I was put on the Strathclyde Police Command and Control system (999 call taking system). CGS had won this on the back of a series of successful systems developed since 1976. However, the Strathclyde Police was to be new technology. At the same time many of the senior technical staff left the company or moved into more senior management roles. This left a void as to how the system was to be implemented using new technology (C and the VOS operating system).
I was left with some basic notes on how one of the people who left saw it working. Based on this, and taking home the VOS manuals to read each evening, I designed and developed the server architecture. This was before the days of databases and helpful user interfaces. Everything had to be written from scratch.I could have walked away, I'd have saved my self years of stress if I had. But again I saw it as my mission to make a success of the project.
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​During the project there was a failure in CGS management, with the company eventually being bought out by Hoskyns. During this period I was left to work entirely under my own initiative with no management support.
My high moment with the Strathclyde Police Project was getting a 121 user system to perform on a computer with about 3% of the power of a modern laptop. Having failed a series of performance tests, over a six month period, we were given one last chance – otherwise the project would be scrapped. I knew I just needed time. Each performance test showed improvement, but not enough. The last set of changes I proposed I felt would get us over the line. However, my company senior bosses decided they wanted to charge the police for them. I knew without them the project would be scrapped, and there was no way the police were going to pay more. It was a crazy position by our management, without the changes they would not get paid a penny of the £1.7m owed for the system. Also, more importantly to me by now, the good people of Strathclyde would not get their new 999 call taking system. So I started the development in secret and the night before the tests I managed to get the final software changes and we passed with flying colours. I was hailed a hero, told by the police “You’ve saved a few careers today, Steve” then dragged to the pub. I didn’t get a dressing down for going behind their backs, nor did I get a word of praise. My colleagues and immediate superiors were generous in their praise.
CGS also won command and control projects for Gloucester, Leicester and Sussex police. Everything I developed and discovered I rolled forward in to these projects, making a success of them all.
In 1994 I joined Dopra Systems Integration. They had just won a command and control project for British Transport Police and needed somebody to design the server architecture. I therefore got to design the server transaction management system for what became the NSPIS (National Strategy for Police Information Systems) command and control (999 call taking) system i.e. the Home Office’s preferred command and control system for UK policing. Putting all my knowledge and experience I was able to design something that offered performance, load balancing and reliability.
The British Transport Police was well run by management so didn’t suffer from the performance and reliability issues I had to sort out at CGS. However, in parallel Dopra were working on a command and control system for Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. This was full of bugs and the performance was awful. I was given a freehand to sort out the server side bugs and performance. It took me around eighteen months and, although the project ran late, it did get there. I can add the Hampshire Fire and Rescue service to the five projects I worked on at CGS that wouldn’t have got there without my hard work (very long hours), skillset and tenacity.
Following on from this in 1997 I joined Unisys to work on the NSPIS HOLMES2 project (for major crime investigations). Initially I was recruited to write the software to link all the incident rooms in the country. This allowed linked incidents across forces, something that the first incarnation of HOLMES lacked. Thus a linked incident would allow investigating officers to research them in parallel, irrespective of which force’s computer system they were on.
This was a complex piece of software. It was prior to web technologies which would have helped and prior to parallel database technology which would have made life a lot simpler. As each force had its own database I had to write low level communications software to link the forces reliably and securely.
I achieved this (and it was the only module of HOLMES2 to work first time in the field) and was then asked to look at the performance, integration, reliability, security and rollout of the system. I was shocked to find none of this had even been thought of. At the same time the project had a management change and I, with my reputation for sorting out big problems in police IT, was trusted to sort this out while other teams concentrated on the application logic.
The performance was awful – a surname search on a fully loaded database took 26 minutes. The requirement was 2 seconds. There was no security – the password for database was hardcoded and shared all over the place. Only one instance of the system could run per server, not allowing parallel testing and training systems to operate on the same server. All the documents (e.g. witness statements) could be read by anybody on the network. The installation (required per force) required each module to be individually installed on the server and the client PCs – thus making installations and upgrades very time consuming and liable to human error. There was also no configuration management or version control. The Unisys technical manager and project manager had completely failed in their duties and the Home Office technical representatives had never checked this multi-million pound flagship development was being implemented properly.
The Unisys project manager and technical manager both moved on and, after explaining what I was doing to the new management team, they allowed me to carry on sorting it out. I ended up being on the project for six years, working long hours and sorting all this out and getting a system live to outwit the millennium bug suffered by the first version of HOLMES. It was career suicide and, during, the six years I was on it web technologies had come in and I got left behind. However, my sense of duty to UK policing drove me on.
Twenty-five years on HOLMES2 is still working and installed in each UK police force. I can add HOLMES2 to the six aforementioned emergency service projects that wouldn’t have got there without my hard work (very long hours), skillset and tenacity.
Post this, and struggling for work with my skillset now out of date as a developer, I took a support job at Wiltshire Constabulary, looking after their Command and Control System and HOLMES. However, they graded the job the same as their garage mechanics and I had to work well above my grade to deliver what the job really entailed. One of the early things I noticed was (i) the software on each PC was not being kept up to date and (ii) the hot standby system hadn’t even been installed. I sorted this, including a seamless switch over to the standby system by the press of a single button.
During this time I realised how dependent the system was on good administration of the Oracle database. As this skill was lacking in-house I took it on myself to qualify as an Oracle DBA. I funded this myself and studied in my own time.
However, I came to the realisation that Wiltshire Constabulary was structured to build careers rather than provide a public service. This hit me hard. When I sorted out the performance on the Strathclyde Police Project some of the senior police officers remarked, “You saved a few careers today, Steve.” At the time I was chuffed, but now I realised what they meant.
For seventeen years I had lived, ate and breathed emergency service IT. I did make a considerable difference and I'm proud of that. I never shied away from picking up the most difficult things to resolve. Often without being asked. I was driven by a desire to give UK policing the best systems possible.
However, my realisations at Wiltshire Constabulary coincided with Police IT systems becoming more product based c.f. bespoke projects on a force by force basis. This meant the field had narrowed and it was going to be even harder to get back to being a developer in this field. Therefore, after much thought, I took a job for the remainder of my career developing cheque processing systems for charities, local authorities, banks and private firms. I preferred working with charities and local authorities the most. It gave me the buzz, my civic duty still being performed!
I worked in IT for thirty years, never worked on a failed project and was never made redundant. This is rare in the IT world.