Exactly one year ago, MCP announced the acquisition of Seattle-based MTG Management Consultants, which today is known as our Justice, Management, and Technology (JMT) services team. This acquisition has generated enormous benefits for our clients and the firm over the past 12 months.
The acquisition brought highly skilled, passionate, and knowledgeable subject-matter experts to MCP, and we’re extremely pleased with how well they've integrated into the firm. This largely is because the subject matter experts at MTG share the same core values that have been in place since MCP’s founding — persistence, integrity, trust, accountability, and prudence. These shared values enable the JMT team to serve its clients extremely well, as it did before the acquisition. What has changed is that it now offers new, more robust capabilities to its clients.
Cybersecurity is an example. Public-sector organizations, including those in the justice community — i.e., prosecutor offices and court systems — increasingly are being targeted by cyberattackers. Justice and other government agencies now can leverage our comprehensive suite of solutions and services to greatly enhance the cybersecurity postures of their organizations.
Another example concerns data integration. There is great need for bidirectional exchange of actionable data across the entire government ecosystem, e.g., law enforcement agencies, the offices of prosecutors and public defenders, court systems, and departments of correction. The challenge to this is that data is available in mind-numbing amounts across federal, state and local government agencies, it is highly disparate, and roadblocks exist at every turn that make leveraging it extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Anticipating this need, MCP two years ago acquired Denver-based URL Integration, which today is known as our Data Integration Solutions (DIS) team.
This team is developing solutions for analyzing data — often by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies — to give it the context it needs to be actionable. They also are developing interfaces that enable data exchange between organizations — and their networks and systems — that previously were siloed. This means that all of MCP clients, including those that came to MCP via acquisition, now have these capabilities at their fingertips — literally, their toolbox has grown into a very substantive toolchest.
Yet another example concerns a request that we recently received from a long-term MTG client that wanted to develop training for its program managers in the areas of risk management and vendor management. Both are in MCP’s wheelhouse, and the JMT team has been able to tap into an impressive amount of expertise that wasn’t available to them pre-acquisition. Even better is that this training, which focuses heavily on best practices, can be shared with other clients with similar needs, and with internal staff members to enhance their knowledge. This will enable us to serve our clients better, which has been a passion of ours since MCP’s inception.
All of that said, this acquisition hasn’t been a one-way street — MCP also has benefitted from the influx of MTG’s talent and expertise. Change management is an example. MTG's change management capabilities have greatly expanded MCP’s toolbox. Nearly every project we touch has some aspect of change management, and while we have provided some element of this in our project management delivery, the multiple change management experts who joined MCP as a result of the acquisition have put our firm in a much better position to serve our clients in this regard.
The MTG and URL acquisitions are the direct result of a growth strategy that MCP decided to pursue several years ago. For the first decade or so of its existence, MCP grew organically and did so impressively. But it was decided that the firm needed to grow inorganically as well. One driver was to accelerate the growth of our company. But the far more important driver was to add new capabilities more quickly to better serve our clients and meet their needs — which constantly are evolving as their missions change. It usually takes less time to acquire capabilities than it does to develop them internally.
In addition, MCP’s focus since its inception has been on the public safety community, but today we focus beyond public safety and more on justice and public sector organizations, e.g., the State of Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. The integration of MTG has enabled us to do that very effectively.
While the one-year anniversary of the MTG acquisition is an important milestone for all of these reasons and more, we’re not done growing — stay tuned!
John Chiaramonte is president of MCP’s consulting division. He can be emailed at JohnChiaramonte@MissionCriticalPartners.com.
