Scottish Government publishes £20m ‘digital evidence sharing capability’ invitation to tender 

The Scottish Government has published an invitation to tender to create a ‘digital evidence sharing capability’ between the principal justice agencies in Scotland.

The £20m contract, over five years but extendable to eight, was published on the Public Contracts Scotland website on Friday, seeks help from software solutions providers to build a system aimed at the ‘secure collection, editing and sharing of digital evidence between multiple organisations.’

The solution will be required to support the full service journey, capability catalogue and system support for the lifecycle of digital evidence. The service journey includes the collection of evidence from local authorities, businesses and the public, through to the editing of multimedia assets by both police and prosecution, and onward sharing to other parties such as defence agents and the court system.

Led by Scottish Government the beneficiaries of the project will be: Police Scotland, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service and the legal defence community.

The solution’s purpose is to enable end users to collect, edit and share digital forms of evidence such as CCTV, other multimedia and documents.

The functionality and capabilities of the solution are expected to include: asset storage; multimedia conversion and transcoding; searching and indexing (including integration with external data storage); viewing (including video playback); editing (including bookmarks and clipping); auditing (including chain of evidence); support for retention and archive policies; and deletion.

Data types to be covered include (but are not limited to) multimedia such as video, images and audio, and documents. The solution should also support reporting and integration with other systems such as crime and case management.

Related services include (but are not limited to): system customisation and development; application hosting; technical support and maintenance; helpdesk support; and full service management (at least second and third line).