When we launched MCP a little more than a decade ago, we established some pretty aggressive growth goals, especially for a firm that was operating out of a garage and had no clients at the very beginning. Nevertheless, each goal was met with room to spare. Our ability to do so hinged on a single, overarching, inflexible focus on delighting the client.

The core values that we have embraced from the very beginning—integrity, prudence, trust, persistence and accountability—have been integral to this effort. Persistence and accountability have been particularly important because they have enabled us to always do what we said we were going to do—which goes a long way toward delighting the client.

Also important has been MCP’s approach to recruiting staff members. “Topgrading” is a methodology developed by Dr. Brad Smart, who is considered by many to be the world’s foremost expert on hiring practices. The goal is to recruit A players, who are defined as the top 10 percent of professionals in a chosen field. The subject-matter expertise of our A players, which covers all aspects of the emergency communications ecosystem, has enabled MCP to help its clients address their technological and operational challenges and opportunities. 

This hasn’t always been easy. Our clients range from the very small to the very large, and they are scattered across the country—their individual needs vary greatly based on their size and the populations/geographic areas that they serve. Further complicating matters is the warp speed at which the public safety sector is evolving. To keep pace, we have had to recruit experts who bring skillsets that weren’t on the radar screen just a few years ago.

To help us add vital expertise regarding data—which is something we’re very passionate about—today we announced the acquisition of URL Integration, which will enable MCP to expand its data-integration capabilities. URL specializes in the implementation of complex data projects for the criminal justice and public safety sectors. These services can be provided to our clients by a vendor-neutral firm that understands the importance of integrating data into the entire public safety ecosystem to improve communities’ emergency-response outcomes. 

Here are a couple of ways our clients will benefit from this latest venture:

• We now can offer new vendor-neutral solutions—including analytics, systems integration, and artificial intelligence—to help our clients realize more value from their data and supporting applications such as field-reporting, computer-aided dispatch (CAD), and records and jail management. These services promote interoperability, facilitate stronger decision-making, and generate improved collaboration between agencies.
• URL brings strong technical talent with many years of experience in public safety and criminal justice, including data architects, business analysts, project managers and software engineers and developers. Together, we can help our clients assess, procure, implement, manage—and now integrate—complex systems and build automated workflows. And we can help expand the emergency response process to include records management, evidence management, citations, corrections, state crime centers, the courts, and human and health services.

Data integration is a lynchpin regarding the future of public safety. Research indicates that emergency communications centers don’t want to comb through a tsunami of raw data to make decisions regarding who to send and where. What they want instead is a much smaller volume of highly contextual data—and effective data-integration strategies will be the key to delivering it.

One of the most important aspects of the URL acquisition, from the perspective of our clients, is that we now can help them link their various systems via a vendor-neutral integrator, no matter what systems or vendors they currently use. This further will enable our clients to move forward with data integration without the need to buy a lot of new systems.

We’re excited about bringing URL, as well as the experts we recently added from Black & Veatch Public Safety, into the MCP family and believe our clients should be as well.

We look forward to working with you in new ways in 2020. More information about MCP and URL Integration can be found here.