Customer Case | The Dutch National Police Innovates with Betty Blocks

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. The next step is to expand the use to our national and international partner organizations.

Steven Hanekroot | Product Owner at The Dutch National Police

Create 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:

Foster continuous learning and growth

Provide conditions for learning and prioritize permanent development.

Become an insight-driven organization

Leverage state-of-the-art technology and intelligence to grow into an information-driven organization.

Balance costs, maximize value

Strike a healthy balance between maintenance and development costs.

Build a safe, agile and inclusive culture

Create a safe and diverse agile work environment for highly productive teams.

Innovate with evidence, not assumptions

Implement evidence-based practices for innovation success.

Hard-to-manage Excel sheets 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Steven’s team is responsible for driving innovative solutions, which was challenging due to an outdated way of working.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:

Collaborate on innovation

As an intuitive board to share innovations and get support from colleagues, experts, testers, and sponsors.

Increase transparency

To create more transparency so employees know what is available to use and what the status is of new innovation projects.

Crowdsource solutions

A place where everyone can post a challenge in need of an innovative solution.

Connect & mobilize experts

As a network function to rapidly find the right experts and create agile teams.

The innovation portal, used by 2,000+ active users, has already resulted in some impressive gains

Innovation success rate soars

The success of implementing innovative solutions increased from 20% to 80%.

Eliminate duplication

Prevents duplication and provides a clear and pleasant insight into current innovations.

Foster a culture of collaboration

Learning the organization to collaborate and innovate.

Drive business-led innovation

An increase in innovative ideas coming from the business.

Building the foundation for organization-wide citizen development

The Dutch National Police is a true innovation frontrunner in adopting citizen development. When building their first application within an IT team, they already knew citizen development would be the end goal and prepared for it. They set up a Center of Excellence for citizen developers, low-coders, and experienced developers to ensure application development happens safely and governed. The Dutch National Police has very strict regulations for security, which a platform such as Betty Blocks needs to adhere to.

The police’s platform team closely collaborates with the Betty Blocks platform team to ensure the platform always adheres to the highest security standards. The collaboration between the Betty Blocks platform team and the Police optimizes the reliability, manageability, and governance of the Betty Blocks low-code platform, especially for on-premises solutions.

Creating success together

Currently, 20 applications are built across six teams. The Betty Blocks team supports the police with development guidance and Q&A sessions. The continuous support from Betty Blocks is instrumental in having employees without formal coding experience join the development process.

With training and coaching on the job from Betty Blocks, the police set up a BizDevOps team consisting of citizen developers, low-coders, and experienced developers because the synergy between these roles delivers higher value. Offering a growth path for employees who want to go from citizen developer to low-coder and even experienced developer ultimately makes colleagues less dependent on external partners. Betty Blocks also supports the police with senior developers.

These developers collaborate with the development teams of the police and deliver in-depth knowledge and expertise to the development process. This collaboration is instrumental for Steven because it enables him to build even quicker and flexibly across departments. He can take on more work, and while developing, the developers from the police learn from the Betty Blocks team. Combined with the platform’s customizability, the team can build complex use cases and scale applications in use and functionality.

Building upon 3 main pillars of success

To make sure there is a solid foundation in place to scale citizen development, the police focus on 3 main pillars:

Standardization

By creating components in the look-and-feel of the design system of the police, they ensure that built applications always adhere to branding guidelines and that all built apps have a unified user experience across the board. Betty Blocks is an official standard software production system in the police’s SDLC.

Reusability

Built applications, pages, templates, and functionality are saved as reusable components. They can be shared with other police organizations, which results in new applications being built even faster and a back-end of easily manageable microservices.

Training and coaching

Employees can become citizen developers with the support of Betty Blocks and internal programs such as management awareness training. Combined with the engagement on the innovation portal, this leads to a significant increase in participants in the citizen development program.

Transforming law enforcement together

With a low-code platform to fuel their innovation needs and a solid program to onboard and engage citizen developers, the Dutch National Police is taking significant steps on its digital transformation journey and is experiencing major benefits such as:

Innovation involvement

Organization-wide engagement in innovation projects.

Empowered teams, better results

More autonomy, higher productivity, and more enjoyment.

Build the right solutions faster

Faster prototyping and testing, which leads to building the right solutions.

Optimized UX boosts user satisfaction

Increased user-friendliness and higher adoption of built applications.

Significantly lower costs

Significantly lower cost and fewer resources needed for development and maintenance.

Smarter testing and smoother launches

DTAP (development, testing, acceptance, production) street with separate domains allows the police to test production apps with users. This leads to higher predictability of usage and lower downtimes.

The Dutch National Police realizes a 70% increase in innovation feasibility and adoption

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