After experiencing early gains with its business intelligence (BI) rollout, the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) hopes its analytics tool from IBM can help the agency not only report on past crime trends but also forecast and predict them.
The police force’s phased BI program which began in 2005 now enables officials and front line personnel to extract near real-time data from the system which is helpful in producing trending reports. But the EPS can reap further benefits from the system when it achieves forecasting capabilities hopefully sometime next year.