The world we live in gets more complex every day. Against a backdrop of those complexities, the stakes for security and public safety have never been higher.

With changing crime types and a society increasingly reliant on technology, brands, businesses, companies and especially governments have basically had to adopt a data-driven approach to safeguard people’s lives and livelihoods.

This year’s winner of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards in the “Best Global Expansion” category is Accenture PLC. The company’s crowning achievement this year was its co-development (with the Seattle Police Department) of the Intelligent Public Safety Platform, or IPSP. It came to life in Accenture’s R&D center in Dublin — nicknamed the Dock.

“The Intelligent Public Safety Platform is all about combining different datasets together and taking a platform approach to using data within public safety,” said James Slessor (pictured, left), global managing director of public safety at Accenture. “It allows us to bring a whole host of different types of data together in one place, put that through a series of different analytical transactions, and then visualize that information back to whoever within the public safety environment needs it.”

Slessor and Loren Atherley (pictured, right), director of performance analytics and research at the Seattle Police Department, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the various data-driven public safety efforts that leverage cloud data technologies, such as Accenture’s IPSP. (* Disclosure below.)

Reinventing how we stay ahead of malicious activity

While Accenture has been a leader in the enterprise solutions space for a while now, this is the company’s first foray into public security enhancement software. The bold, brazen stance it took, in partnership with the Seattle Police Department, while developing the platform could reinvent (and improve) how we stay ahead of malicious activity — whether online or offline.

“I think what we probably don’t understand necessarily is that most police departments build sort of purpose-built source systems to onboard data and make good use of them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that data is readily available,” Atherley said, delineating the benefits that the Seattle Police Department hoped to reap with the platform. “We’ve also been able to do a whole host of research projects designed to better understand how police operate in the criminological environment, how are they performing, and really make the best use of those assets as we have them deployed around the city doing law enforcement work.”

From a public administration standpoint for the Seattle PD all the way to a purely enterprise one for Accenture, both of these organizations weighed in equally on their thoughts regarding the strides that a forward-facing platform like IPSP could pioneer in its space.

“Public safety agencies are really able to understand what they know and the information that they have and make it much easier to access and understand that information. I also think it’s allowing us to perform levels of analytics and therefore insight on those datasets, which previously public safety agencies have struggled to do,” Slessor concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE