Date: 2018-10-12
Accepted
Allocation of Prison Offender Managers is a new process being introduced by OMiC, and it's different from Offender Supervisor allocation (data for which is mostly stored in per-prison spreadsheets). The data which will be created by this process does not live anywhere yet.
We've heard that some prisons are starting to use the new terminology and have started to store staff names as POMs against prisoners in NOMIS (although they are not actually using the OMiC model yet). There is no support in NOMIS for the tiering data or anything else needed to support the allocation process.
We have learned from our allocation discovery that staff around the prison need to know who is responsible for a prisoner, but there's no indication that storing that data in NOMIS is a good way of meeting that need.
We don't know much yet about the user needs around handover of responsibility from prison to probation. It's possible that there will be a stronger need to store some allocation data in Delius (for example) so we may need to revisit this decision in future.
HMPPS needs to reduce its dependence on NOMIS over time, and building an ecosystem of APIs around new datastores will enable data to be used in other services without it all needing to be in one central database. The keyworker API is an existing example of this pattern.
The allocation API will store all data created by the allocation process in its own database.
We will not also write allocation data back to NOMIS or any other system.
It will be clear where responsibility for this data lies.
We will be responsible for a critical data set, and need to operate the service appropriately for that context.
This is a high-level principle, so as we begin development we'll need to consider how far the scope of this decision extends in practice.
We will need to ensure that any POM contacts which have been added to NOMIS are removed when those prisons move to the OMiC model and start using the allocation manager.