Law Enforcement

Tim Daley has an aggressive plan for growth.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Crime Cog | Defining New Markets | Law Enforcement | Milford, MI | Tim Daley | Twelve Month Goals | Web 2.0

In this 6 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 32MB), Tim Daley outlines his plan for building Crime Cog into a business with $150 Million in revenue over the next three years. Much like Dennis Blanchette at Ensure Technologies, he sees four avenues for growth. One is by a direct sales force. The second is by acquisition. Tim estimates that there are over one hundred independent record keeping firms that operate in part of Crime Cog's market. He intends to acquire them and convert their customers to Crime Cog's more comprehensive system.

The third growth avenue is through partnering, and the fourth is through increased tie in with federal programs. All of these avenues for pushing into the market are helping Crime Cog become a de facto standard resulting in strong word of mouth.

Tim outlines three challenges to building a scalable business: personnel bottlenecks, technology acceptance, and cost of infrastructure.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Crime Cog | Defining New Markets | Law Enforcement | Managing Growth | Milford, MI | Tim Daley

In this 5 and a half minute segment (download iPod compatible, 28MB), Tim Daley, CEO of CrimeCog, outlines three challenges he faces in making his business scalable. The first is scaling human resources. In the beginning, when CrimeCog had only three employees, he used to do everything from sales to computer programming. However, as the business has grown to 25 people, he has needed to delineate the tasks people perform so that they do not require "genius" problem solving skills or special knowledge.

The second challenge has been technology acceptance. Tim has been hiring people with law enforcement experience in order to facilitate customer communication. Increasing penetration of the Internet has also helped. In 1999, he was trying to figure out how to get Internet access to small agencies. Now, they already have it and understand the basic browser technologies required.

Finally, in combination with the second challenge, the cost of infrastructure to support his business has declined markedly.

Tim Daley describes how he started Crime Cog in a large corporation and then purchased the software as the foundation of his own business.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Crime Cog | Finding Gaps | Law Enforcement | Milford, MI | Tim Daley

In this 9 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 47MB), Tim Daley describes how he started Crime Cog to focus on law enforcement agencies who would not have the resources to create and maintain such a system themselves. Tim originally worked on the system as an employee of TRW. Then TRW was purchased by Northrop Grumman, and work on the project ceased while Tim went to work for R.L. Polk.

Ultimately, Tim decided to approach Northrop Grumman for exclusive rights to sell the software as a service to the small law enforcement agencies he had originally envisioned. After 9.5 months of negotiation, he had a deal that granted him exclusive and perpetual rights. Tim was able to forego having to reinvest the $20 million development cost of the software.

Recently, with the help of angel investors, he concluded a deal to purchase the software outright. In future segments, we'll discuss how he intends to use this resource to grow his business.

Crime Cog connects islands of law enforcement data. Tim Daley, Crime Cog's CEO, describes its value proposition and who it sells to.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Crime Cog | Law Enforcement | Making Substitutes | Milford, MI | Tim Daley | Web 2.0

In this 14 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 70MB), Tim Daley, CEO, introduces us to his company Crime Cog. In a nutshell, Crime Cog's business is connecting all the islands of information in the criminal justice system from police to sheriff to courts to corrections to parole. There are three components of the value Crime Cog proposes to these constituents:

• Reduced maintenance. The separate agencies no longer have to maintain their own systems, including hardware, networking, and software.
• Increased efficiency. In a traditional arrest, officers may need to enter a detainees demographic information 28 times and have to physically transport data between agencies. All of that is eliminated in Crime Cog's system.
• Increased effectiveness. Using publicly available data from multiple agencies, investigating officers are better able to connect the dots in investigations.

Crime Cog's initial customer focus has been police agencies. With this segment, they have found strong network effects leading them up to higher and higher levels of spending authority including sheriffs departments and county executives.

In future segments, we will learn how Crime Cog assembled the resources to pursue this strategy and its future goals.