Principle One joined techUK in September 2021 and it was an important step for us in kickstarting post-pandemic networking and identifying broader opportunities to accelerate our growth. The combination of techUK’s in person and online events have given us opportunities to build new connections and enable more of our growing team to build knowledge of market trends.
We’ve enjoyed attending networking events, including the recent SME speed dating, and techUK continues to play an important role in opening up opportunities for SMEs such as ourselves to get our voices heard with customers and other organisations across our core policing and justice customers.
It was a logical next step this year to look at whether we could get more involved within the techUK community and take part in some of the working groups that promote cross-industry collaboration on some of the most complex and challenging problems that our customers face. One of the benefits we see from techUK’s approach is that as well as joining up insight from large and small suppliers across industry, it can also help bridge gaps between multiple customers who need to work together ever more closely to tackle these challenges.
Robin Sanderson joined Principle One in September 2021, having had a long career working in the delivery of cross-organisation information management solutions across the UK Law Enforcement community. A key element of this work is getting data standards right to ensure interoperability across organisations and promote collaboration at a local, regional and national level.
Robin has been involved in national and international working groups around the creation and evolution of standards for the law enforcement community including in the field of communications data. This has given him a unique perspective around the challenges of deploying standards across a disparate community of government and private sector organisations and getting data delivered both in machine readable formats and, crucially, to the end user.
For Robin, getting involved with techUK’s Interoperability for Policing Working Group (IPWG) provides a welcome opportunity to build on this experience and really make a difference to the UK law enforcement community through his role in Principle One. Robin attended his first working group this November and was impressed by the commonality in purpose of the set of members from companies ranging from large to small and from product suppliers to consulting-led organisations. “Bringing together such a broad range of perspectives across industry is a very positive sign to promote collaboration and I’m looking forward to contributing further to the work of the IPWG in 2023. This gives us an opportunity to create a culture where interoperability is designed in from the beginning rather than often considered almost as an afterthought.”
In contrast to Robin, Phil Tomlinson joined Principle One following a thirty-year career in policing. Despite taking retirement from the MPS earlier this year, Phil is far from done in terms of his appetite to drive change within policing. Since joining us this summer, Phil has been able to get involved in a number of different transformation initiatives through our participation in the Home Office Accelerated Capability Environment’s Vivace community. This has given Phil an opportunity to bring his operational experience to bear in driving national initiatives to help build on best practice across policing as well as applying his own lessons learned from driving digital transformation within CT Policing and MPS.
"I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at the Met and Counter Terrorism Policing – not just because of the operational roles I performed, but because of the fantastic teams I worked with. Now I am working with Principle One, I can start to use my knowledge and experience in a different way, as well as working with another fantastic team. Whilst I am still very busy, my focus has shifted from managing operational problems to generating operational solutions and I have enjoyed the freedom to take a more strategic view.”
More recently, Phil has been selected to join techUK’s RASSO (Rape and Serious Sexual Offences) working group, working in partnership with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Police Digital Service and College of Policing to address the challenges faced by policing in all parts of the investigative process in tackling these crimes. “The first meeting is next week – so there hasn’t been much to say yet. But I am looking forward to meeting the other members of the group, sharing our experiences and maximising the value of our collective expertise in challenging ways of working and driving change.”
Looking ahead into 2023, Principle One is looking forward to working more and more closely with techUK and finding more opportunities to collaborate with industry partners through their network. Just like any SME, every penny of marketing spend is hotly contested and our membership of techUK is possibly the best money we have ever spent!
Principle One has been featured by techUK as one of its SMEs of the week as part of its focus on social value this December – you can read more about Principle One and our partnership with techUK here.
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