Case Study: Vancouver Police Department achieves resilient, searchable access to critical digital-forensics knowledge with ThoughtFarmer

ThoughtFarmer is helping a Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Unit manage their vast database of knowledge

ThoughtFarmer helped the Vancouver Police Department’s Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Units (government) solve a critical knowledge-management problem: the teams handled huge volumes of devices, video, photos and case data, and their DIY SharePoint-based system had crashed and become unrecoverable, leaving investigators without searchable institutional knowledge and at risk from staff turnover. They needed a resilient intranet that could host hundreds of training videos and quickly surface critical information — even inside PDFs and diverse file types.

The VPD selected ThoughtFarmer through an RFP and deployed it as a central KM platform for SOPs, training videos, software/hardware procedures, legal correspondence and more. The result: investigators can uncover relevant information far faster, saving time and money (for example, quickly locating instructions to extract data from older phones), the platform is used daily across DFU and CU, and the department is rolling the solution out to other VPD units.

Vancouver Police Department

Brandt Watkins

Digital Forensics Unit Sergeant