It’s difficult enough to keep up with the competition and innovation in the investigation market…

Significant investment every year

Have you ever considered what you need to invest internally on your ‘software guy’ over 10 years to ensure that your investigation management capability matches the field? A world class investigation management system should be right now considering technology on the table for adaption to your needs. These new capabilities are exciting and your customers will want them when they see them… and they are coming. Are you ready to be a great IT company as well as a great Investigation Management company?

Deal Breaker: GPS visual, reportable, web-based?

Although you probably do us this to some degree, is it embedded in your maps, your reports, your client logon? Can you easily prove effort from a log or does it take you hours of effort per request? If not, your competitors can beat you on cost and capability. Our customers can I’m sorry to say.

Deal Breaker: Mapping

We’ve all been wowed by the capabilities or a good map. Our offices are covered in them. Pins everywhere, we even point at them a lot and say things like ‘Joes is there on Monday and There on Tuesday’. This sort of tech really should be able to feed off your case information don’t you think. Some of the better case tools out there (like PCMS) already do. Our customers are benefiting from better allocation, better scheduling, better client awareness/communication and better long-term territory management.

Deal Breaker: Cell Phones

As these devices gain in capability, there will be a time where your case software will be embedded in the cell phone. You need to be considering that the competition is developing applications in this space already and their teams will have cellphone access to their case data, be able to log entries, locate points of importance, take and instantly upload photos, video and other things.

The bolt-on play

An alternative to an integrated capable investigation software solution is the bolt-on. This is where you get a bunch of different technologies and get your own IT guys (yes, you will need more than 1) to integrate them, enter the configurations, test each update and it’s effects on the others and generally do what an IT team does. The problems with this approach are that unless you have some seriously good IT guys available, you will quickly end up burning hours loading data between all these applications. We’ve seen it, we’ve replaced it in more than 30 companies so far.

The Next Generation

To get to the next generation, you are going to need to invest internally or externally. Vendors like Polonious are able to aggregate the cost of these technology changes across a large install base and keep the cost of the software down. We believe you need to be looking at either alternative carefully.