It’s a New World as Edmonds and Snohomish County plan Oct. 27 launch of unified records system

With incident response increasingly requiring coordination between multiple agencies, the ability to instantly share information has become critical. The New World system allows all agencies from police to fire to major incident teams to share information in a common format, ensuring that the right personnel and equipment get to the right place at the right time.
With incident response increasingly requiring coordination between multiple agencies, the ability to instantly share information has become critical. The New World system allows all agencies from police to fire to major incident teams to share information in a common format, ensuring that the right personnel and equipment get to the right place at the right time.
It’s been seven years in the making, but on Oct. 27 the switch will be thrown linking the more than 50 Snohomish County public safety and first responder agencies together in a new unified dispatch and records-keeping system.

“This will get county agencies like police, fire, the jail, and more on a single system,” said Edmonds Police spokesperson Sgt. Shane Hawley. “Dispatching, report writing, and record keeping will at last be all in one place, so we can have instantaneous access to information across all agencies.”

The software developed by New World Systems will provide a single report writing, dispatching and record-keeping interface, allowing the various agencies instant access to each others information. Headquartered in Troy, Michigan, New World has been providing software solutions to public agencies for more than 30 years and serves more than 2,000 customers nationwide.

Before New World, Snohomish County agencies maintained separate systems with different reporting formats and protocols. Sharing information between these “silos” was cumbersome and time-consuming, and everyone’s job was more difficult.

“For example, a person might commit a crime on one side of a street in unincorporated Snohomish County, and then sometime later cross the street and commit a crime inside the Edmonds jurisdictional boundaries, and be arrested by Edmonds police,” Hawley explained. “Under the old system, Edmonds police would not have immediate access to the suspect’s previous criminal history because it would be on a different system and reported in a different format. New World changes that. We’ll have instant access to everything, all in a consistent format.”

Snohomish County, with its array of agencies each with an individual set of needs, presented a particular challenge to New World.

“We’re the largest, most complex group that New World has taken on,” said Hawley. “It required numerous adjustments to their software system, and much testing as each new modification was rolled out. But all the pieces are now in place, we’ve tested thoroughly, and all is now set to go live at the end of this month.”

Even after all the rigorous testing, nothing is being left to chance. “For months we’ve been entering data into the new system, while still maintaining the old one, meaning that we’ve essentially been doing everything twice,” Hawley explained. “This will continue after switch-over until we’re certain everything is working perfectly. Even with this, New World representatives will be here to handle any unforeseen issues that may crop up.”

— Story and photo by Larry Vogel

 

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