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40 Law Enforcement Technology March 2015 www.officer.com A D V A N C E M E N T S I N T E C H N O L O G Y TALKING POINTS How much is your time worth? Take the same principle to law enforce- ment. Don't look at reports, evidence, CAD/RMS entries, e-mails, car/body camera operations, or other comput- erized tasks as tasks; look at them in dollars and cents. Look at them as your budget dollars in salary. Now of that salary, take a good look at how much you're losing because of those tasks. Not because they have to be done, but because of how they're done. How much salary are you spending on com- puters that are slow? Servers that are slow? Systems that don't stay up? What about inability of officers in the field or at home to complete work when not inside the station? Even worse, how much do you pay an officer or a ven- dor to support technology that is old, resource restricted, or just "needy?" From a budget perspective, you have two issues: The first is the money you spend on your technology. The second is the money you waste by your staff 's inefficiency using that same technology. Oddly enough, IT expenses are the easiest to reduce and control but the last place administra- tors look. You have to purchase cars, ammunition for qualifications, provide officers training, uniforms and equip- ment...the list goes on. What if you could reduce or almost eliminate an IT budget? Only you know what you spend in your agency for that. What could you do with that money? More than you're doing now, right? Think: Return on investment How is it easy? Go back to the busi- ness model. Make the thought process more in terms of "Will this give me a profitable return on my investment?" instead of "I gotta do this now?" One place agencies might find a return on investment—especially in the years to come—is in the area of cloud based solutions. CJIS-compliant cloud based solutions do exist, and they're definitely worth a look for any law enforcement agency. Before CJIS-compliant hosting was available, agencies couldn't leverage the massive market that businesses have been tapped into for years. Making a case for the cloud Why cloud technology? Because regardless of your agency's size, you might never achieve what a cloud-based solution would give you at the prices they offer. If you duplicated a cloud environment and tried running it in- house you would still be paying more. The sheer volume of a cloud environ- ment is what gives them the ability to Circle 34 on Reader Service Card Circle 35 on Reader Service Card