Wednesday, September 29, 2010

ShotSpotter: My Comments, Green fails at verbal Gundown of Storch


Councilman Storch, I think your analysis of the issues surrounding the Shotspotter (see here) proposal was spot on. 

Now I have one quibble with the administration and the council and that is that the devil is in the details. I have been in technology for over 40 years and have seen many systems go down the tubes and it happens for several reasons:


  1. The vendor over promises and under-delivers.
  2. The people making the decision don't have the technical expertise.
  3. The vendor provides only anecdotal evidence and no verifiable hard scientific facts to verify the performance claims of their solution.
  4. Positive references provided by the vendor were paid for.
  5. Lack of customer expertise to administer the system after the vendor leaves.
  6. Lack of buy-in from the people using the system, even if they have the expertise.
  7. Lack of buy-in from the stakeholders. In this case the community that is to be the supposed beneficiary of the solution..
  8. Lack of written and monitoring of performance guarantees from the people charted with administering the system. Example, can you guarantee the arrival of a Police car within 3 minutes of the shots being fired?
Now even if you get all of these things done, it just gets you to the point of having a functional system.

The next phase should be a go/no-go pilot to verify that the solution can actually meet the promised deliverables (in this case a reduction in crime the justifies the cost of the project). If it's a go, there should be a phased implementation. If it's a no-go, can adjustments be made to improve the pilot?
If yes, implement the improvements, restart the pilot and go through the cycle again. If no, close the project down and get your money back. Better still hold the monies in an escrow account and if no-go take your money out and close the account. If a go, pay them in stages with the final payment going to them six months after the successful completion of the project.
YouTube - Videos from this email

3 comments:

olddoc said...

Nat, although you are "spot on" about the vendors and "Shot Spotting" I have to thank you for the link to "Baseball". This routine is one of the top 10 of all comic routines and it was great to see it again..

Anonymous said...

Nat,
Here is a silly question. Do you think we Plainfielders would have these issues if we were to succeed and become a part of Middlesex or Somerset Counties. Not that they would be crazy enough to want us, but since we do border on both... and Jerry is not going anywhere anytime soon, its a thought.

Nat Singleton said...

Anon 10/2/10 4:37 PM:
No,it would not make a difference. Some things that would make a difference would be: having a census count of over fifty thousand, winning the Democratic City Committee.