Applied Knowledge Management in the Police Force of Baden-Württemberg

The Challenge

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli already realised in the early 19th century that "the most successful people in life are those who have the best information”.

This quote is today more topical than ever, as the success of any innovative and future-proof company depends increasingly on the extent to which it succeeds in accessing, disseminating and applying information within the organisation and learning in the process. Meeting this challenge contributes significantly to sustaining and increasing a company’s ability to act, be productive and innovate. It is therefore of particular importance to actively manage both existing knowledge within an organisation and requirements for further knowledge and training.

Aiming to maintain its leading position among internationally competing regions, the state of Baden- Württemberg has successfully met this challenge with the innovation project “POLIZEI-ONLINE”.

The Partnership

The POLIZEI-ONLINE project is part of a Public Private Partnership founded in 1998 between the police force of the state of Baden-Württemberg and T-Systems. Collaboration within this partnership has been so successful that the project was awarded the PPP Prize for Innovation by the Federal Public Private Partnership Association and the “Behördenspiegel” in 2006. This award was won at the congress “Effizienter Staat”. The decisive aspect to the jury was that POLIZEI-ONLINE is not purely a financing plan; rather, the partners combine their respective competences and experience to take advantage of the resulting synergies.

The success of this innovation project, which is unique in Germany, is based on combining competences and adhering to objectives such as:

The Knowledge Portal

POLIZEI-ONLINE is the central point of entry for all members of the Baden-Württemberg police force. As a comprehensive knowledge and working tool, it supplies the 32,000 employees of the third-largest German federal state working at over 700 locations with up-to-date information, instructions and supporting applications.

In specialist portals (e.g. Operations, Transport, Crime), teamsite-based Communities of Practice discuss and communicate issues and solution approaches across the entire federal state, giving all employees access to existing solution approaches.

Editorial teams, working and expert groups from over 40 police stations supply the portal with news and articles, learning offerings and specialist applications, tools and reference manuals, support specialist communities or training measures. POLIZEI-ONLINE is based on an open service architecture that integrates content management, editorial tools, education management and
collaborative tools.

Blended Learning as a Success Factor

Consistent use of e-learning and blended learning enables a swift response to current training requirements for very large target groups and is at the same time highly economic. The blended learning training for the EU-wide introduction of the digital tachograph was so successful that it received the European E-Learning Award 2006 (EureleA).

Quo vadis POLIZEI-ONLINE?

The POLIZEI-ONLINE developments are attracting increasing national and international attention. Therefore the system is also being used and developed further in national and international police collaborations.

The police force of the state of Hessen was the first to make use of the experiences and developments of POLIZEI-ONLINE and has already adopted significant parts of the knowledge management system.

In addition, a knowledge and information platform on the Internet is being created for use by the member states of the Central European Police Academy (MEPA) and developed further on the basis of experiences and developments with POLIZEI-ONLINE.

This will allow the eight MEPA member states to exchange information of their law enforcement agencies on a supranational integration platform. The POLIZEI-ONLINE/MEPA-ONLINE project, financed by EU subsidies, is a unique reference system for the whole of Europe.