Beyond the Call: Technology's Transformative Impact on Public Safety

In a live stream hosted by Avèro Advisors, public safety experts Mike Cole, Megan, Seaton, and Robert Kornovich discussed the importance of technology in the public safety sector. They highlighted the need for strategic planning, policy development, and data management when implementing new systems like Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Records Management System (RMS). They also emphasized the importance of being upfront with the community about the use of technology and having clear policies in place. Emerging trends in public safety technology include drones, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. The experts also stressed the importance of involving stakeholders early in the process and managing vendor relationships effectively.

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Transcript

Megan (00:00):

Avero Advisor's live stream where today we are diving into the topic of public safety. I am happy to introduce you all to Mr. Mike Cole, who is our subject matter expert with extensive knowledge in public safety. Good morning, Mike.

Mike (00:16):

Good morning.

Megan (00:17):

And you guys know Mr. Robert Kornovich, who is our Director of Advisory Services and former CIO. So good morning to you, Robert. Hey, good morning. Yeah, so if you guys are joining us today, please comment and let us know where you are joining from. We'd love to hear from you and please, please, please engage with us, ask us questions, comment, love to hear from you all. And if you are new to the live stream, I'm Megan Seaton. I lead the business development team at Avero and Avero Advisors is an independent third party consulting firm, specializing in consulting around it, strategic planning, ERP, consulting and business process, re-engineering. So to kick us off, I do want to let Mr. Mike Cole introduce himself. So Mike, introduce yourself. Tell us about your journey and how you have became the expert in public safety.

Mike (01:14):

Thanks, Megan. So I come from a law enforcement family. I was interested in law enforcement from an early age. My dad was a career law enforcement. He was a sergeant on two different departments, and I remember as a kid he would take me out on ride-alongs and just talk to me about what he does. And I was kind of fascinated by it. So I started my journey in 1989. I started with the sheriff's office in San Luis Obispo County, California. And I worked a variety of different assignments there. It was an interesting department. It was three offices in one. It was a sheriff's office, it was a Marshall's office and it was a coroner's office. So we not only did the normal sheriff patrol activities, crime suppression investigations, but we handled courtroom securities. We did the civil process for the county and then we investigated every death natural or suspicious throughout the county.

(02:08)
So it was great experience. I worked on the juvenile task force there, so I worked with juvenile probationers probation office doing undercover by bus for liquor law violations. I worked very closely with the gang task force there. I was on the search and rescue dive team, the Swift water rescue team did business license investigations, background investigations, and then I was promoted to a senior deputy position and I was in charge of field training officers for the substation that I worked out of in the south part of the county. I worked there about 10 years and at that point we decided we wanted to move to Arizona. And so we looked around for a long time and we found an agency that I really wanted to settle on, which was the Paradise Valley Police Department. And I started there in 1999. And again, I started back at the bottom in patrol.

(03:05)
I worked there for a couple of years in patrol, did field training. I got a lot of opportunities there. There was a lot of training opportunities. So I went through accident reconstruction. I was on our CAD RMS committee, so I helped in the selection of a new CAD RMS system. At the time we were on an MS DOS platform, so it was a huge jump to jump to something that was actually Windows based. I did a lot of the community outreach. So I was assigned starting projects like the child safety seat. I was commissioner of the public safety fair, bringing the community together and a lot of the organizations and resources available to the community. I won officer of the year for my community outreach efforts. And then two, I got assigned as a detective. So I got a lot of experience there. I specialized in technology and computer crimes, crimes against children, elder abuse and arsen and bomb investigations.

(04:02)
But really I worked all crimes that came in. I worked a number of really complex cases. I had a serial pedophile. It was a teacher that was actually molesting third grade students for years in the classroom that went undiscovered. And then I had a homicide near the end of my detective career that involved drug trafficking and human trafficking, and I won officer of the year again for my solving of that homicide. In 2004, I got promoted to sergeant, and again, every time you get promoted, you go right back to patrol. So I'm back on nights graveyards, working patrol, but I got to supervise a lot of different areas of the department. In that role. I was in charge of the entire field training officer program. I was in charge of the crime scene officers, the fatal accident reconstruction team. And then I also had the ability to teach at Arizona Post as an adjunct instructor.

(04:59)
So I taught 10 years supervision and leadership concepts to newly promoted supervisors and senior supervisors. Through them, I got assigned as out of patrol into an administrative role. So I was the administrative sergeant for a while. I did grant supervision statistics and UCR submissions. I was the entire CAD RMS system administrator for our department. And then I supervised the property and evidence function within the department. In 2013, our town actually decided that they really wanted to push technology in the police department, and I was promoted to a lieutenant position in order to take over technology for the entire department. And that was really a challenging role. Robert was involved in that as well. But we were a very affluent department, so we were the most affluent department in Arizona, one of the most in the United States. We went from a town manager that felt that we didn't really need to push technology to a town council that said, we want our police department to be at the forefront of technology, and we have the funding to do so.

(06:10)
They give a go from zero. We had no computers in the cars at that time to we want everything and we want you to be the leaders in the state. So in that role, I got to do everything from site visits, writing RFPs, demos, selection, implementation, management of vendor contracts. It was a really, really rushed timeframe, but really interesting and challenging, and I got a lot of experience out of that. So I did that for a few years. I was promoted to a commander position. So as a commander, I was running half the department. We swapped every couple of years. So I got a chance to run both sides of the department, but primarily my focus was on technology. I spent a lot of time trying to keep all that new technology relevant, current working and updated, and then the staff that's required to maintain that, which I think a lot of times people don't consider when they're installing new technology.

(07:09)
We always think technology will make life easier and us more efficient, but it actually requires more from staff. You need more staff to keep it running currently. So I actually had the opportunity as well to be chief. So I was Chief Paradise Valley Police Department for a while. In between selection processes of a retiring outgoing chief and a new chief, I was asked to step in and run the department, and I did that as well. So in 2022, I retired after 34 years of law enforcement, was happy to be retired. As my career in law enforcement education side, I have associate's degrees in marketing, management, administration of justice. My bachelor's is in human resource management, and I have a master's of leadership.

Megan (08:01):

Wow. That is quite the resume. Mr. Cole, and thank you for your service, your 34 years. That's incredible. We really appreciate it. Real quick, I do want to dive into some of the things that you and Robert worked on and the unique perspectives that you all bring to the Avero Advisors team. So whoever wants to start with that.

Robert (08:25):

Oh, I think the biggest thing was expectations management across the board. That was-- That was the biggest trick. Like we've talked about before, it was a dream scenario in that we had a council giving us a big pot of money and say, here, go find technology. So initially it's like, well, this is pretty easy and straightforward. Let's go find you some technology. But really it was the political dynamic within the organization that was the most challenging. We didn't exactly have a chief on board with what was going on. He felt technology was a threat and he was not bought into this at all. So that was a really tricky landmine to have to navigate. And then the end user perspective as well. Before Mike says this saying, I will say it, the two most difficult things in law enforcement is the perspective that police officers tend to have towards something which is, say it for me, Mike.

Mike (09:27):

Yeah, the two things police officers hate or change in the way things are for sure. And that holds up every time. And a lot of times they will undermine the change because they just don't buy into it. And that's what Robert's talking about is that change management.

Robert (09:45):

And then there's also, which goes along with that, which is there's a high degree of suspicion as to what does this mean? And we see this typically with a lot of end users regardless of where they are in local government. But you're talking about folks that are very highly trained to size things up quickly and make a decision. And they are trained to see perceived threats very early on, and they can see a lot of this technology coming their way as a threat rather than an improvement of their actual job and as a useful tool. And as we found out, the minute you go live with it, suddenly it's an essential tool for them where the vehicles didn't have computers in them, no big deal. Everyone thought, well, I'll use the thing if it's in there, but I'm not going to make it the most important thing. Three months after we put computers in the vehicles, if the computer wasn't working, they would down the vehicle, they would try and find another vehicle because now it's an essential tool. So there's just a lot of change management, I guess is the other area you would call it that had to be very carefully navigated within the department and within the organization as well.

Megan (10:56):

So can you dive into that a little bit more from an Avero Advisors or a third party consultant perspective? How do we combat that or how do we help manage that specifically within the public safety sector?

Mike (11:11):

Sure. Change management has to start early. You can't implement something and then try to manage the change within your department. It's too late. And I think one of the things that Avero does very well is we involve the stakeholders, the people that will be using the technology early on in the process. We get their input. We ask them, what are your pain points? What are you currently dealing with that's causing a problem for you and your workflow daily? And then we ask them, what do you need? And we try to give them the understanding that we are there to get rid of those pain points and to get them to that vision of here's what I would like to really be able to do with technology in my job to make it easier for me. And then we involve them in that process of defining the criteria they're looking for, selecting the vendor, seeing the demonstrations that the software really can do, what they want it to do and what they need it to do. And those incremental steps along the way. We build that buy-in that this isn't just the chief's newest, latest whizzbang plan and it'll be gone in a year. This is really what they're asking for and what they need.

Megan (12:22):

So what are some of the emerging trends in technology within the public safety space, and how have these trends or technologies enhance emergency responses within public safety?

Mike (12:39):

Wow, that's really a loaded question because technology is exploding so quickly, and particularly in the realm of police work. One of the things that I think of initially when you talk about technology that's emerging is drones. We're seeing a rapid implementation of drones in police departments, and they're being used for a variety of applications and they're being used for search and reconnaissance. There's agencies that are launching drones from their departments to livestream, video from active scenes before officers can get on scene. They have a live view of what's going on before the officer gets there. There's departments that are issuing drones to patrol officers, many drones for building clearing. So if you've got a possible gunman inside of a building, instead of sending an officer in there, you can send a drone in there and fly the open rooms and see where they may potentially be or clear a room and say that they're not in there.

(13:42)
The future of those is really interesting. I think as the technologies get better, cameras get better. There's companies working on being able to launch drones from patrol cars and have it automatically map an accident scene or a crime scene and do your scale diagrams for you and take that off of the officer. That's one of them. I think one of the other really big trending technologies is going to be artificial intelligence or machine learning. I've seen some really exciting things there, particularly in the area of video surveillance. Taking an officer's body-worn video, an AI program runs against that, and if it detects a gun in somebody's hand, it can alert the officer, it can alert the dispatcher. Same thing with the surveillance videos that we might have in a downtown district that's being monitored by an agency. They can detect traffic crashes, they can detect guns, they can detect fights. And instead of a person watching the monitor and having to see that, they can automatically alert the dispatcher and let them know, Hey, we need to take a look at this and send some officers. So I think that's pretty exciting and it's really on the cutting edge at this point. I've seen it in demos. I haven't seen it working in live, but I think we're really close to getting there.

Megan (14:59):

Yeah, yeah. So Robert, from your perspective as a former CIO, what challenges did you face in aligning technology initiatives with public safety goals?

Robert (15:13):

Sustainable funding, like I talked about in a video last year, especially the situation we were in, again, the funding was established and put in front of us, but it was a lot of that was onetime dollars. It was a onetime purchase. And we've seen that again with folks using recovery funds or availability to grant money. They see a pot of money, they think of a onetime solution, they go out and they buy something and then they move on and they don't consider the recurring costs. So I had to be careful because my I.T. budget increased enormously because with implementing a new or an upgraded CAD, RMS system, license plate readers, body-worn camera, just even basic data connectivity to get the vehicles hooked up through cellular carriers really increased my maintenance budget. And it is a difficult area to navigate because council's given you a lot of money, but at the same time, they don't want to hear that this is still going to cost them money three or four years down the road.

(16:19)
They don't look at it that way. They just, here's the money, make it work. Give me to where I need to be, and there we go. So it was a combination of that and also Mike and I were very focused on looking at what makes sense for the organization. We can go out, we can buy a lot of fancy stuff, but we knew that a lot of it was just going to wind up sitting on the shelves if there's no defined purpose for it, if there's no policy reinforcement from command staff, it's not going to get used. I mean, people are not going to spend their time on their shift using 27 pieces of technology just because they think it's interesting and cool. They're going to go, these are the three things I need to do my job. I don't care about this other stuff.

(16:58)
So we had to be very focused even amongst ourselves without necessarily relying upon a decision from command staff or leadership as to, okay, does this make sense to do? Should we do this? And if we do, do we need to go for the utmost in technology in this particular area, or is it an area that'll serve the organization best that doesn't require 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year annually in recurring costs? I think that was sort of the secret sauce or the magic. It would've been easy for us to just go out, buy stuff and plug it in. We actually paused and thought a little bit about what makes sense, and some of it's accountability too. I have to show maximum return on $3 million and it's going to be awfully embarrassing to go back to a council the next year and ask for sustainable funding on something. And they go, "why did you guys buy cameras that you put in the right of way every 200 feet?" That's not what the town wanted. So steering through those political landmines, making sure the funding is there, making sure that we're doing what's appropriate for the organization was the trickiest areas. And a lot of that just tied into I.T. because again, a lot of this, the recurring cost usually comes out of I.T.'s budget, or at least it did at that time.

Mike (18:20):

Yeah I think, Robert.

Megan (18:20):
So... Oh go ahead Mike.

Mike (18:23):

Yeah, Robert mentioned three things that I really want to hit on because I think there are a particular value to our organizations that are looking at doing a major implementation. Three lessons really learned by us, and the first is the policy. You have to have a good policy in place before you turn this technologies on. We all know cops. We're going to find the easiest way to do things, whether that's the way the department wanted it done or not. If I can do it in one click, I'm going to do it even though it might take three clicks to do it the way the department wants. Without a solid policy in place, you're not going to be able to enforce that. You're not going to get good data integrity because people are going to be doing things different ways. So you end up with not clean results and maybe not what you're looking for either.

(19:10)
So that's the first part. Policies are critical. He talked about the funding, and that's huge. I agree. I think people feel like, Hey, we made this major technology implementation. We spent a bunch of money move on it's done. And it's not done. You have to maintain that every year and you have to plan for replacement like your computers and your cars. They're not going to last you forever. You need to understand what the lifecycle is on those. And one of the things that I think we were particularly good at is we did lifecycles and equipment replacement charts. And so we had a chart out for every year into the future what we need to replace, what it's going to cost, so we could sell that to the council. They understood that, and instead of coming once every three or four years, Hey, I need a million dollars to replace all this equipment.

(19:58)
We would come once every five years and say, I need 200,000 this year to replace the computers and the cars, and next year I need 200,000 for the gateways. And it kind of leveled out that expense for the council. It wasn't such a big ticket item. And they got used to, oh, I got to put in a couple hundred thousand dollars, or I got to put in a half a million dollars every year to maintain this. And it set that expectation that we're going to keep coming back, but it allowed us to smooth out those peaks so we didn't replace everything in the same year. And then the third thing that I think is really important that he talked about was a public opinion. And I've seen this in a number of agencies, agencies that we've worked with that have lost technology because they didn't manage public opinion.

(20:39)
And I'll give you one example from our own experience. Again, it was a very, very affluent town that we worked in. One of the technology implementations we put in were license plate readers, and we put those on the intersection, we put them on the infrastructure, the traffic signals of the intersections. And when we planned those out, we talked to our detectives and we said, where are you seeing the points of entrance and exit from the town that are being used by the criminal element? Where do you need license plate readers to monitor those areas? And they identified two particular intersections that were not signaled. There was no equipment in there to hang license plate readers on. And we said, well, we are going to put license plate readers in these two intersections because they were identified by our investigations bureau was being critical. And when we went to our public works and said, Hey, here's one of the intersections we want to do, they pushed back and said, we just spent three quarters of a million dollars putting in a beautiful roundabout and landscape.

(21:38)
You can't hang a giant metal pole with cameras in the middle of this after we just did this. And so we came up with the idea of using faux cactus. We have faux cactus all throughout town, as many cell sites for cellular transmission. And so somebody said, well, we've got these faux cactus everywhere. Let's just put a faux cactus in the middle of the roundabout. It won't draw attention away from the beauty of the roundabout that we just did, and we can do that. And we tried actually to get ahead of it and explain to the public what we were doing. We had a town manager that was nervous about that and wanted us to wait until he could message it correctly. And of course, it got out that we were putting cameras and cactuses before we could message it ourselves. And it turned public opinion. It was a huge media story. And the truth is we had 14 camera installations on traffic signals and only two in cactus. But the story was we're trying to hide cameras and cactuses to catch people. So getting in front of that public relations and saying, look, here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. Here's how we use it. Here's our policies so you can see what our policies are on it is vital.

Megan (22:50):

Yes. I love that you mentioned that about strategic planning and policy development. That was my next question, so thank you for touching on that. So let's talk a little bit about where-- Okay, say I'm a chief of police and I know that my organization is operating well back in the 1980s, right? I'm am way behind and I know I need to make a change. Whether that's implementing a new CAD system or RMS or just becoming more efficient through my business processes. Where do I start as a chief of police? What is step one?

Mike (23:29):

Sure. It's tough. And we worked with organizations that are in that position, and when you're that far behind, you don't even know what's possible. So it's really a hard position to come from. I would say a great first step is contacting a Avero because we can manage that process for you. If you have a good technology staff, you're fully staffed, you're just trying to update what you're currently doing, you're staying competent in the industry, you can do a lot of the stuff for yourself. If you're that chief that is 20, 30 years behind, your staff probably doesn't understand the technology. They don't know what's available, they don't know how it interacts. I think it's critical really to involve somebody who does understand those aspects, understand the long-term implications of extended maintenance agreements, vendor relations tricks that the vendors will play. We've been through all that from salesmen that promise the world to engineers that will tell you the software was never designed to do what the salesman told you after you've signed the contract. We've managed all of those, and I think really the first step is asking for help knowing you're in over your head and asking for help in that situation.

Robert (24:40):

Yeah, you need a partner that can actually, and Mike and I had this experience as well when we were in local government, we had consultants that worked for us and they would consistently give us a bunch of options that were not viable. They saw dollar signs, and so they gave us a list of like a hundred things and said, these will all work for you. Just pick which ones you want to do. And going through and sorting through that information, we had to do a lot of our own research, a lot of our own site visits. So I get to now be that consultant that I was always looking for. Some of that actually gave you reasonable options that understood what makes sense for your organization and your department and also knows to go back to something Mike said a few minutes ago, what internal partnerships do you need to make this successful?
(25:29)
We had a finance director that was willing to go to bat for us to council, and that was huge. But he also made sure that we knew what we were doing and that we weren't going to embarrass him. So legal department as well, that when we were deploying license plate readers, we were warned that there are a lot of civil lawsuits or there's a variety of legal landmines that you have to navigate when you start collecting license plate data. And the community we were in was already doing photo enforcement, so they had been in that area before. But these are all the things that as a chief, and especially if you've been there a while or your command set has been there for a while, you're not going to naturally think of, well, I need to go have this conversation with this person internally about this, or I need to get some advice, or I need to really reach out and see who's got the best LPR data retention policy in the state. That also matches my-- the public records requests and schedule that we have internally, all these things. This is what Mike and I can tell you all about. These are the things to consider. These are the things to look at. This is what you need to do now before you even start the project and start buying money as well as the vendor management aspect of it, which is so key.

Megan (26:45):

So let's dive into CAD and RMS and what those two acronyms stand for and more specifically, how do those systems enhance the efficiency of public safety sector?

Mike (27:01):

Sure. So CAD stands for computer aided dispatch, and that's the software that the dispatcher uses when they take the initial call, the 9 1 1 call, and then they send it to the officer. That's the information that the officer will get on their computer in their car as they're going to the call. And then RMS is a records management system, so the information from the CAD should transfer over into the RMS and the RMS is the software that the officer uses to write their reports. Detectives use to follow up, investigate your property, and evidence custodians use to track property. Your warrants division uses to issue warrants, track warrants. It really is the heart of the department. It's the engine that runs everything after that initial call for service.

Megan (27:46):

Thank you. RK, do you have anything to add to that?

Robert (27:49):

Yeah, for a lot of our customers who might not be in public safety, you think of it as yet another ERP system, and I realize what it is. It is the core foundational product for your daily workflows for your organization. And there's some other, I think some of the same things apply that you'll see in our other videos as well. You can do things like a best of breed approach where you can use a different agency management system than what your CAT RMS vendor offers. You can use a different property, an evidence module, but those are very... There's some real discernment that needs to be done in those situations to figure that out. We're dealing with data conversion with one client right now. Huge topic. Where do you even begin? So those have to be seriously looked at from the get go as to this is the cost of buying this product, but if I want to bring in 10 years worth of data, my cost just went from 1 million to $7 million.

(28:47)
There's $6 million of data conversion, which the vendor's more than happy to do for you if you can find the money. But there's so much nuance in do I want to bring everything over? Is the data even reliable for me to bring over? Am I going to wind up using this data? Is there a better solution for that? Do I start from scratch validation sets? When you set up the CAT RMS system, do you want to drag in the old stuff? Is this a good time for command staff to revisit how you label your calls for service? It's all these little tiny things you run into. No one likes this report because when they originally set up all the disposition types, it got associated with something that made a report no longer work correctly. These are the times to fix that when you're migrating to a new system and not just drag in old things, but that requires incredible planning and incredible involvement from a variety of decision makers to get right.

(29:44)
So even though it's a lot like a typical ERP product, the timeline for implementation and even selection tends to be stretched out quite a bit because now there are major considerations that have to be decided and in some cases there isn't just a good enough decision and let's move forward. You're not going to get lightning in a bottle again. You want to be able to have this cat RMS system last 10 years if not longer. I guess a lot of organizations are looking for. It is too much of a disruptor to have to replace your CAT RMS every four or five years. No department seriously looks at replacing their CAT RMS on a regular basis. So it really has to be done right. It really has to be sustainable, and I think that's the area that differs from the rest of our customers. What's involved in the stakes involved both financially and with safety of life and reporting and politically are incredibly higher than what we see in other projects, and they have to be treated correctly and managed correctly.

Megan (30:47):

Thank you for bringing up data. I was going to ask a question about data management and specifically about revisiting data policies and how much you should keep and move over. So thank you for touching on that RK. But along those same lines, how can public safety agencies overcome the challenges related to data privacy when they're going through transitions such as a CAD or RMS implementation?

Mike (31:13):

Sure. I think initially that goes back to that. Just be honest with the public and be out in front of it. Don't let them discover it before you tell 'em what you're planning on doing. There's great sample policies, but you're going to have to have a policy in place before you turn it on and you've got to train on that policy and have everybody understand and abide by it. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has great sample policies. There's a lot of great policy management companies available. If you don't have your own in-house staff writing policies, so they're available. Or law enforcement, we steal from each other. Just go to your neighboring agency that's doing it right and say, "Hey, can you send me a copy of your policy? Do you mind if I revise that and use it for myself?" Don't reinvent the wheel, but you really have to be out in front of it.

(31:59)
Some departments have more of a struggle than others. Those that are under consent decree, those that have citizen oversight panels, they want to get those people involved early to look at those policies and talk about what they're doing, why and what the retention is. Some agencies have had success going to the ACLU and say, we're going to implement a license plate reader program. We want to do it in a way that's sensitive the community's needs and concerns, and can you help us in crafting this policy and get them, just give a seal of approval on it before they do it, and then they can go right out front and say, ACLU has been involved in this process. They've looked at it, they've approved the policy, here's what we're doing. And it takes away a lot of those objections.

Megan (32:44):

Right. Anything to add, Robert?

Robert (32:47):

Well, since we started to talk about data, I think cybersecurity is yet another consideration now because even back when Mike and I were doing this, it was a different environment. A lot of CAT RMS systems remained on-prem, they were on servers in the department. It's a different ballgame now. Even public safety vendors, some of 'em in some areas have been in the cloud a long time. But CAT RMS, it took a long time for them to develop models for newer systems that existed in the hosting environment. And it wasn't just necessarily data security considerations. It's like we talk about in a lot of other areas. There's a delicate balance that needs to be done. It's easier now for your IT department to not have to handle very much of your CAT RMS implementation. They just need to provide the computer and connect it out to the cloud.

(33:45)
But that doesn't mean that your IT department is now suddenly hands off on cybersecurity. And that's, well, that's for them to figure out. Who's managing the contract over at the police department, that's for them to figure out not the case at all. Especially with interconnectivity of these systems and the fact that most public safety agencies are using multiple interfaces to the feds, to the states, to other agencies, to regional crime centers, it becomes even more and more complicated the more that you broaden your tool set of what you're providing to the end users and the officers and citizens. So a topic for another video at least, but that's something that as a decision maker or as the person who's been given the responsibility of exploring, how do we get a new CAD RMS system, these are the things now that you have to think about in a lot more greater detail.

(34:38)
Because as the years go by, it becomes more and more complicated. And your interface with the state or the feds, they want you to solve that problem. They're not going to step in and solve your cybersecurity problem for your connection into CGIs. You're responsible for it. You are the one who needs to take care of it. So there's a lot of expectation upon, again, the decision makers, you need to solve that before you go into the implementation on this. This is something you cannot figure out after the fact. What we commonly hear is, well, we've been doing implementation long enough, everyone decided let's just go live with the system. It's good enough. And a lot of things are not taken care of before that go live. And everyone thinks after I go live, I'll have time to fix this later. No, you won't. You'll never go back to it. You'll never have the time. You'll never have the opportunity to go back there and do it correctly. So again, looking at a variety of these areas properly, planning it out, understanding where do I have political support, both internally the department as well as externally. And if it's not going to be successful, then why would you go down the road of spending the money to implement this when you clearly don't have a path to solve a lot of these things.

Mike (35:50):

Yeah, I think Robert hit on a really important topic, and that would be another one of my future technology trends would be cloud computing and software as a service. It's just huge. And I'll say cops are skeptical. I resisted going to the cloud for a long time because I just wasn't sure that number one, the security was there. You hear about big companies getting hacked and then reliable internet connectivity. So you can't be running a CAD software dispatching officers to life and death situations and have your internet connection go down. And now you can't do that. So that part is critical. You can work out the redundant internet connections so that you can keep your system live and dispatch even if you have a glitch. But getting cops past the Is my CS data, my FBI data secure in the cloud? And I think we've really reached that tipping point where for most departments, the cloud storage solutions, the CIGs compliance solutions are going to be much more secure than your cities servers, much less likely to get hacked.

(36:53)
And I started moving before I retired, acad RMS system to the cloud. That was just recently completed. Very successful. They were very happy with the results, but it reaps huge benefits in that I had staff that was full-time dedicated to just maintaining and managing the software system and updating. And that's all done by the vendor now. So I know a lot of agencies have trouble with getting enough IT support to support their technology implementations. You can offload that and let the vendor worry about it. Yeah, it's going to cost you a little more in the contract, the annual maintenance, but you don't have to worry about trying to beg an IT guy to come and update the server because it's required for compliance.

Robert (37:35):

Another solid point on data is if you are spending your use of technology or you haven't really had a lot of this before, now you're going to start using, you're going to give every officer body-worn camera. In-car video is going to be in every single vehicle. You're going to start collecting LPR data. There is a mountain of data coming at you that you have to figure out how you're going to manage that. And it is a serious consideration. You won't believe as you implement these tools, the flood of data you're going to now have coming in and you got to decide what you're going to do with this. How long am I going to hold onto it? Who's going to have access to it, who's going to manage it when I have a public records request? Public records request now become incredibly complicated because you now have four or five officers showing up on scene with their body-worn camera plus their in car video.

(38:27)
Someone has to sit and edit that out. There is AI technology to help you edit that, but someone still has to review that before it gets kicked out to the door in a public records request or a media request. And if you don't have someone identified or a team identified to handle that, you're going to be behind from day one because the public's not going to care. They're just going to want to know why is it taking three months for us to get this video from this incident? So you have to seriously look at the mound of data that's coming in situations where when it's going out with a public records request or data sharing.. You know, how am I going to handle that? How is that going to be managed? And a lot of it comes down to just simply staff. You can't solve a technology problem with even more technology in this situation. You're going to have to solve it with staff and oversight and policy and a variety of other factors that weren't a problem two years ago when you didn't have technology like this. But now it's the number one priority for improving public relations.

Megan (39:28):

Right. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Mike. Oh, go ahead.

Mike (39:31):

Yeah, there's a number of, just to piggyback on that, there's a number of departments that have implemented a body-worn camera program. And like Robert said, if you haven't done it, you don't understand the implications of it. And they've had to cancel their body-worn camera program because they don't have staff available to do those reviews. Redactions and public records releases. And so they bought the cameras and then they put 'em in a box and put 'em on a shelf and said, we can't use 'em because we can't have the staff that's required to comply with the legal requirements of this. And that's just another area where our expertise, and we've been there, we've done that comes in. We can tell you right upfront, Hey, here's some other things that you should consider if you're going down this path. Not services we sell, not money we're getting, but just here's our experience. Here's the things that you need to do to make sure that this program's going to be a success in the long run.

Megan (40:22):

And to piggyback off of that, do you guys care to share maybe a few examples of where your client side experience informed your approach to your advising experience, specifically in the public safety sector?

Mike (40:40):

I'll start off with one and then I'll kick it over to Robert. We've dealt with salesmen and we've dealt with the demo people and we've dealt with the engineers and the contract people, and we've learned a lot of lessons over the years. And I kind of mentioned it earlier, salesmen will tell you anything to get the sale and then they're gone. And when you're really implementing it, you'll find out that the software, the engineers will tell you the software is never designed to do that. It's never going to do it. We've had salesman tell us, we don't have it now. I can't demo it, but it's coming out in Q2 of next year, so just wait. It'll be here. And you sign that contract. And it never materializes because it was never in development and the software was never designed to do that. And from those experiences we've learned to when we're talking to our clients in discovery sessions and saying, what do you really need in the software?

(41:27)
And we have them listed. What's critical? Like if it can't do this, but it can do everything else, you're still not buying it and what's desired. And then we come up with a demo script so that when we narrow down the vendors for selection and invite them out for demonstrations, we say, okay, now your salesman told us it can do this and show us. And we've got a checklist of all those things that they said, this is critical we have to see this. Now show us in a live environment. Don't show us a recording of you done some mouse clicks. Show us a demo environment, show us how it works. And if it's one of those things that they say, "Hey, it's available in Q2", put it in the contract. If it's not in the contract, you're never going to hold 'em accountable for it. So if you still want to choose this vendor and they're telling you it's available, talk to the engineers.

(42:13)
The salesman may tell you something for a sale, but the engineer knows that it's his job to develop it. And if he says, it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen. Talk to the engineers, talk to the vice presidents and say, is this true? Is this coming out? And then we want it in the contract and it's not in the contract full refund. And you hold 'em accountable that way. So I think learning all of those tricks and just unethical things that can happen when dealing with some vendors really helps us navigate that for the clients so they don't have to go through the same pain.

Robert (42:44):

Sure. Yeah. It's a reason why we spend so much time upfront building out requirements in great detail, documenting the current state, documenting future visioning, doing process maps, because those are in a lot of ways, living, breathing documents that last the entire life cycle of what you're doing because that's now what you use for selection. Well, yeah, for selection initially of your shortlist for cat RMS vendors and in particular to use one example that distills into your system demos, okay, department stated that there's this and this and this that is required by the state. That has to be, this is not nice to have. We'll have in the future working on it, whatever. No, the day we go live, this has to be here. This is a state reporting requirement that has to be there, making sure that no one loses sight of that. That is involved both in the initial review of the proposals when you're doing system demos and even contract negotiation when you get to the final contract. Going through again and making sure that all those key requirements that were defined by your users and your command staff and other decision makers makes it all the way into the contract before you put ink on that contract.

(44:02)
And then annual maintenance agreement. I used it too. I would take key points when negotiating my annual maintenance agreement or when working with my vendor saying, Hey, you guys promised us you would have the new state accident form in place and ready to go by Q1 of this year. It's Q2 and it's nowhere in sight because a lot of times the long-term management of the vendor gets passed off to someone who was never on the selection committee, never was involved with the implementation of the software. It was just an auxiliary assignment given to someone. And how do I make sense of this? How do I know what to hold the vendor accountable to? So a lot of 'em move on to other things. And you don't manage the vendor relationship. You can use all this documentation that was there from beginning of the project to get up to speed.

(44:49)
Now I understand why we put that into contracting language because this is a critical requirement that needs to be done. That's why we focused on this escalation fee because that's what we told the council, that the maintenance agreement only escalate by three and a half percent per year. So just gathering that information correctly using a partner like us obviously, for helping to gather that, that becomes useful documentation down the road so that someone can easily look and go, oh, this is why this decision was made three years ago. This is why we set the system up this way because here's the process map of the way the end users expected it to work. Use the heck out of that documentation. It does nothing but reap benefits and just doesn't become a dead document that three months into selection. Okay, well, we don't need the requirements traceability matrix anymore. No, keep that around. Keep referencing it. That is a useful tool that pays dividends throughout the entire life cycle.

Megan (45:46):

And I think it's important to note here that vendors, oftentimes if you do not have a checklist or a defined vendor script, when they come in and do demos, they're going to show you all the blinky lights and all the cool features of their software. And so you could kind of lose sight of what your outcomes are as an organization. So as Robert mentioned, document, document, document is so key. All right, guys, I'm going to wrap us up here today. Thank you for joining. I think this was a very insightful conversation and a topic that we haven't really dove into much. So I think you guys had some good things, good advice to share. As we wrap up, will you all provide just two key takeaways each from today's conversation that you would like our public safety viewers to take away from this conversation?

Mike (46:39):

Sure. I guess I'll start off. I would say first one is you need to understand slow the process down. Don't just go out and Hey, we need X, Y, Z technology. Oh, this is the big name. Let's just go buy it. Slow it down because you're going to live with that for a long time. It's really hard to go to your council and say, Hey, I just spent a million dollars on this technology. It didn't work out so great. Can I have another million dollars? Nobody's going to want to do that. So slow it down. Really define what your needs are so you understand when you're looking at these technologies, what's going to be able to match those needs well. Do site visits. Go talk to agencies that have implemented it that are using it. How is it working for you? What are the problems with it that you wish you could correct?

(47:25)
And then just really good contracts to hold them accountable for what they're promising. And then back to just being upfront with your community and your council about what you're doing, why you're doing it, what the policies are. We've all seen bad case law created by agencies that are going out there doing things that are kind of questionable. We really don't want to tell the public what we're doing because they may not like it. When that gets found out, it puts a black eye on all of us, and that's how we get court decisions to take away technology. That is a valuable tool for us. So don't be afraid of the technology you're using. Be right up front about it. Put your policies on your website. Have your chief do a podcast and talk about, "Why are we doing this? What's the benefit to the community and what are we doing with the data?" So be right out in front of it and make sure your community's aware.

Megan (48:14):

Yeah, thank you, Mike. Robert.

Robert (48:16):

Yeah, the good news is it's all solvable and it's all fixable. There are paths. We lay out a lot of landmines in this discussion, which is good because that's discussion of risk and liability is the purview of command staff on a daily basis. There's no reason why you can't look at these projects the exact same way. So being honest about the risks, but there are solutions there. There are ways to get there. And it doesn't mean you got to blow up your IT budget or your implementation budget to get things done. Second one's the ones I always say, I love handing out free advice. You got questions for us, you got a CAT RMS contract that you're not sure about, or it's an even worse situation and you want some free advice, reach out to us and Mike, and I'd be more than happy to talk to you and just give you some guideposts if you're still in the middle of contracting, or point some things out that you can look for in your existing contract if you're trying to get a vendor to pay attention to you or get on board. We've done that a million times, so.

Megan (49:17):

We have, which brings me to my point, which is, guys, you don't have to do this alone. You do not have to do this alone. We put out so many resources on our website. Mackensie has shared links to our YouTube channel and to our newsletter. Please make sure you sign up for that. And as Robert mentioned, if you have any questions or any comments, please feel free to reach out. We're available on every platform. But with that being said, thank you guys for joining me today and we'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks. Bye.