Nivadis

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Nivadis (NIVADIS) is software that is used by the Lower Saxony police as a process management system (VBS) . Through input, administration and analysis, it systematically processes data that was collected in the context of events relevant to the police. The abbreviation is the acronym "for Ni Eder Saxon V organgsbearbeitungs-, A nalyse-, D okumentations- and I nformation S ystem". The system introduced after technical difficulties at the beginning replaced the outdated MIKADO system in 2004.

Development history

Forerunner MIKADO

The Lower Saxony police had been working with a case processing system called MIKADO since 1989 . Here Motorola m88k systems (were Motorola 88000 ) and 200 proprietary Unix multi-user systems with 5500 terminals for Siemens BS2000 - mainframe used.

The Motorola systems were set up in all police stations, first with CISC - CPUs , in a later generation RISC CPUs. As operating system was Unix uses and applications relied on Informix - databases on. The systems were operated using serially connected terminals . It was later also possible to exchange data between the systems.

Functionally and technically, this system corresponded to the conditions of the early 1990s. With the further development of the INPOL system to INPOL-new , changes became necessary that could no longer be implemented in the old Mikado environment. For this reason, the MIKADO program, which had been in use for around a decade and was out of date, had to be replaced and replaced by a completely new system.

MIKADO-neu becomes Nivadis

In order to develop a new process management system, the "MIKADO-new" project was founded together with the company Mummert + Partner (later Mummert Consulting, today Steria Mummert Consulting ) following a tender . In the project, the Lower Saxony police developed the new system together with the company Mummert Consulting. It was staffed equally with company and police employees and lasted about five years. Nivadis was developed according to the V model .

As planned, Nivadis was to replace the outdated MIKADO system in 2003. At the start in September 2003, however, the system showed massive performance problems and failures.

In 2004, the expansion was stopped for a short time because there were again performance problems: A few weeks after the restart of a subsystem, the system performance became so bad that further delivery was stopped for two months after massive protests by users and the unions.

After the initially considerable difficulties in performance (among other things, the time between input and output of results was far too long), massive efforts were made to improve the system. With this offensive at the end of 2007 it was possible to avoid system failures, improve processes and increase acceptance.

NIVADIS is constantly being further developed. The "Police Office for Technology and Procurement Lower Saxony" (PATB NI) in Hanover , which is affiliated with the Central Police Directorate (ZPD), is in charge .

Technical specifications

NIVADIS is implemented as a client-server architecture. The central server cluster runs on Itanium machines ( high availability cluster with Itanium 64 servers). All data processed in the police inspections on site are managed in an Oracle 9i database . Furthermore, a BEA - WebLogic platform (version 8.1) and a data warehousing system from Cognos are used.

The Nivadis client is implemented in Java and integrates 23 individual applications such as for criminal charges and traffic accident reports . The software is installed on 11,600 newly purchased PCs (11,620 Linux computers) in all police stations in Lower Saxony and initially ran on SUSE Linux 8.1, now on Fedora Linux 8 Werewolf.

In addition to transaction processing, a “ LibreOffice ” package ( word processing and spreadsheet ), Ximian Evolution for e-mail and the GIMP image processing suite are installed on the computer. In addition to the intranet access, Internet access ( WWW ) is possible from the Linux PCs. ( Browser software: Mozilla Suite). The software is installed via local servers using "autoyast".

To prevent unauthorized access, Nivadis has a high standard of information security . Every access to the data records is automatically logged. In addition, a sophisticated set of rules for access authorizations has been drawn up in cooperation with the Lower Saxony data protection officer . Particularly sensitive processes, for example, are only visible to specially authorized persons or members of special organizational units of the police.

The concept of central data storage is pursued. The entered data is output decentrally. They are immediately available to the responsible police officer at every workstation in Lower Saxony that is connected to the system.

System advantages of Nivadis compared to MIKADO

  • Modern hardware and software
  • Processing convenience
  • One-time recording - multiple use
  • Connection of external data sources
  • Central data storage
  • Management information / evaluation / statistics
  • Practice-oriented software

Costs and criticism

The development costs for Nivadis amounted to over 80 million euros . Further investments will be made to further develop the system.

In 2008 the Lower Saxony State Audit Office criticized the NIVADIS project as being uneconomical and accused the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior of not having achieved essential goals. Above all, no savings effect was achieved and the processing time for transactions has increased by 150%.

In December 2018, according to media reports, there were significant PC problems across the country, the causes of which were in the area of ​​the server infrastructure due to updates after a switch to Windows 10 in 2018. As a result, in addition to other applications, parts of the NIVADIS system were only available sporadically for a week and data was lost, for example during witnesses. In June 2019 there were again problems with the software that prevented the creation and processing of incidents.

Individual evidence

  1. Oliver Diedrich: Lower Saxony Police are upgrading to Linux . In: heise online , April 17, 2002. Accessed November 24, 2010. 
  2. Oliver Diedrich: With Linux on the hunt for criminals . In: heise online , September 18, 2003. Accessed November 24, 2010. 
  3. Jürgen Kuri: New computer system of the Lower Saxony police often fails . In: heise online . November 18, 2003. Retrieved November 24, 2010.
  4. Nivadis gives Lower Saxony officials a headache - police stumble with Linux project
  5. Urs Mansmann: Temporary stop for the police computer system NIVADIS . In: heise online , January 10, 2004. Accessed November 24, 2010. 
  6. Wolfgang Stieler: Trouble about NIVADIS : Trouble about the new computer system of the police . In: c't . No. 25, 2003. Retrieved November 26, 2010.
  7. ^ Bernhard Witthaut: Court of Auditors accuses the Ministry of the Interior going it alone . In: Rundblick , May 28, 2008. Retrieved November 26, 2010. 
  8. Computer problems with the police after updates in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of December 13, 2018
  9. Stefan Schölermann: Massive PC problems with the Lower Saxony police . In: NDR , December 13, 2018. 
  10. Sylvester Tremmel: Incident recording system of the police of Lower Saxony in read-only mode. In: heise.de . June 20, 2019, accessed June 21, 2019 .

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