Selling technology to cops, part 2

To become irreplaceable to a customer, one must throw open the doors, not build higher fences.

By Nick Selby and Dave Henderson

April 11, 2011 — CSO —

Last week, Dave and I wrote about the high-level concepts behind making your information technology product appealing to cops and police agencies: integration, simplicity and utility. This week, we'll look at the first of those, with a couple of examples.

Part 1: Selling technology to cops: 3 ways to make them interested

When we say "Integrated", we mean that it shares information and resources with other products that the agency has. Since we're speaking about information technology, the "information" part is key. As we said last week, these things would seem obvious, but if you take a look at the stuff that law enforcement agencies are stuck with, you'll scratch your head in wonder.

Information dying on the vine
A court records system that doesn't speak to the computer-aided dispatch system? Which doesn't speak to the state or regional information system? Which don't speak with the DMV's server? We're just now starting to get a photo when we pull a driver license file on the in-car laptops. There was a memo. You might wonder how this is possible in the 21st century, but if you've spent time in law enforcement you'll know that it's not just possible, it's par for the course. When we can't share information, it doesn't get shared, and its value is wasted.

One reason for this is that, because the market is so fragmented -- as we mentioned last week, there are more than 17,000 agencies in the US, and more than half have fewer than 10 officers -- and sales are so competitive, that vendors tend to spend a lot of time making sure no one can chip away at what market they've captured.

This means, on a practical level, creating walled gardens as opposed to open frameworks. Dave and I believe that, to become irreplaceable to a customer, one must throw open the doors, not build higher fences. When an agency uses something and comes to rely upon it, that product becomes more integrated into the department's workflow -- what vendor doesn't want to become more richly integrated in his customer's environment?

No matter what your product is, no matter how tactical you think is its function, information about what it is doing can be used by analysts to help them form a strategically useful view of the world. There are some famous examples of inferences and intelligence from things as unlikely as pizza (the Domino's Effect) and burgers (the Big Mac Index) so you'd better believe that if you have a technology product that is used by a law enforcement agency, its telemetry is important to products other than your own.

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