Semiotic Analysis of E-Policing Strategies in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Technological infrastructure must satisfy business requirements, and more importantly, it must be able to evolve to meet the new requirements. This requires not only a good understanding of business strategies, visions and functions, but also the evolvability built into the architecture. This chapter first presents a semiotic approach to the business and information technology (hereafter IT) systems. This approach treats the IT system as an integral part of the business organisation. The chapter then discusses the applicability of a semiotic framework in the e-government in the UK, particularly in an evolvable architecture for e-policing. The semiotic framework is applied in the assessment of the e-government strategies and systems requirements, and in the analysis of these requirements to the e-architecture. A case study demonstrating the applicability of the framework is conducted to evaluate the implementation of the national Information Systems Strategy for the Police Service (ISS4PS) and the Crime Justice Information Technology community (CJIT) in the UK.