The Dutch National Police Realizes a 70% Increase in Innovation Feasibility and Adoption
Business value
Expected increase from 20% to 80% in the success of evidence-based innovation implementation
Increased developer pool from 400 to 1,200 builders with citizen development
Maintenance and development costs cut in half
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Transforming security and public assistance
With 65,000+ employees, the Dutch National Police is the largest employer in the Netherlands. The police force is charged with security and public assistance in the Netherlands, maintaining public order, and providing assistance. With the pace at which society is moving, it becomes increasingly more complex to orchestrate police work.
The Dutch National Police is transforming its organization using low-code technology and microservices, using the MACH industry standard. This has enabled them to engage employees in innovation projects, reduce costs and resources, and ultimately work towards their goal of making the Netherlands safer.
As a result, they increased their developer pool by 300%, created a 70% increase in feasibility and adoption, and established a 2x cost reduction for development and maintenance. They also expect to increase innovation implementation success from 20% to 80%. Here’s how they did it.
“We now have an interactive portal that offers complete insights into all our innovations and challenges, thereby avoiding overlaps. This has a massive positive impact on operational and widespread use.”
Creating a knowledge-intensive organization
Steven Hanekroot, Product Owner Betty Blocks Platform and Innovation Portal at the Dutch National Police, oversees the innovation team. With Betty Blocks at the core of his innovation projects, Steven sets out to reach critical strategic goals:
Provide conditions for learning and prioritize permanent development.
Leverage state-of-the-art technology and intelligence to grow into an information-driven organization.
Strike a healthy balance between maintenance and development costs.
Create a safe and diverse agile work environment for highly productive teams.
Implement evidence-based practices for innovation success.
Hard-to-manage Excel sheets that stifle innovation
Steven’s team is responsible for driving innovative solutions, which was challenging due to an outdated way of working. Two full-time employees kept an innovation inventory of over 1,400 innovative ideas in Excel that was hard to manage and read. This led to a lack of real-time insights, project duplications, lack of communication, and low usage. As a result, the adoption rate of newly implemented solutions was 20%, resulting in low usage within the organization and failed IT projects, which led to millions of euros wasted.
The Police Innovation Portal makes The Netherlands safer
The innovation portal built on Betty Blocks is the birthplace for all applications the Dutch National Police will build. Because of the balance between ease of use and functionality, the police’s pre-development team (a mix of people with technical knowledge, application owners, juniors, and citizen developer business users) was able to build an innovation platform that supports the innovation community with news, chats, likes, and other social media capabilities. With real-time data functions, the portal functions in four ways: