EVERETT — The makers of Snohomish County’s new emergency dispatch software have deployed a “rapid response” team here to make sure the multimillion-dollar overhaul is successful.
They also are relocating an employee to live in the county full-time to work on the problems. The news was announced publicly more than nine months after the software, called New World, was launched here.
For the first time Wednesday, top leaders of the company that owns the software spoke with The Daily Herald about the issues that have dogged the project before and after its October launch.
Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson in a prepared statement called the company’s announcement “an important step in the right direction.”
New World software is used by about 4,000 police, firefighters, dispatchers and jail staff throughout the county. Its bugs and quirks have prompted questions about its ability to handle major emergencies, such as the June 4 warehouse fire in Everett. Nearly every person who lives in the county is served by a police or fire department that relies on New World.
The New World company was sold last fall to Texas-based Tyler Technologies, shortly after the local launch. Tyler has expertise in large, complex projects with local governments, said D. Bret Dixon, the company’s president supervising criminal justice programs. Tyler reported $591 million in revenue last year.
Tyler leadership also met with Stephanson on Wednesday afternoon. That happened in response to a letter the mayor recently sent the company, saying that the system’s failures were unacceptable. His letter focused on a software bug that delayed backup crews to the waterfront warehouse fire by 23 minutes.
“I believe that they understand our concerns and are taking them as seriously as we are,” Stephanson said.
With 53 police and fire agencies in Snohomish County involved, the launch was the biggest the New World company had ever attempted, said Bryan Proctor, who is now chief operating officer with Tyler’s public safety division. That plan was “bold and unique,” he said.
“We’re here. We’re staying here,” Proctor said. “We’re going to work with the (911 dispatch centers) to address those things as they come up.”
Company spokeswoman Patti Hillen Hall compared Tyler’s relationship with Snohomish County’s first responders to a marriage that had been bumpy in the past but is getting healthy again.
The rapid response team will help “systematically and methodically resolve issues,” Dixon said. That team was deployed in July to help the local agencies better organize, track, prioritize and resolve New World problems as reported by users.
Two 911 dispatch centers in the county, SNOPAC in Everett and SNOCOM in Mountlake Terrace, hold the contract with New World and now Tyler.
Under its previous leadership, New World repeatedly declined to comment on the Snohomish County project. An information packet shared Wednesday says the company’s now interested in sharing “how Tyler/New World is going to improve the current situation.”
“We’re getting a lot better at communicating at multiple levels,” Dixon said.
The Tyler team recognizes now that more resources were needed in Snohomish County to get folks through the complicated software switch-over, Proctor said. On a daily basis, police and firefighters still can be heard complaining on their emergency radios about the software, or arranging workarounds for technical errors.
Local leaders who helped oversee the New World launch, including Everett’s fire chief and the directors of SNOPAC and SNOCOM, say they are committed to making the project work. There is no Plan B, Everett Fire Chief Murray Gordon has said. New World replaced a decades-old system with far fewer features and capabilities.
The 911 centers say it is still too early to talk about performance metrics and any impact to 911 response times. They need to measure dispatch times but also the quality of the dispatching: whether the right questions were asked and the right resources were deployed, SNOPAC Director Kurt Mills said. Police departments for months have been privately blaming New World when they are unable to produce crime statistics and trends.
Mills noted that local users were warned to expect growing pains for up to a year after the launch. Oct. 27 will mark a year.
New World has cost taxpayers in Snohomish County about $6.8 million, not counting the work hours invested by public employees. The software so far has been used here for about a half-million emergency incidents.
Documents shared by Tyler say the company expects “fewer complaints moving forward.”
“In the life cycle of the transformation, we’re at the beginning,” Proctor said.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com
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