Leon Wasilewski and Mike Reed have been friends for over thirty years, joining the Anderson (IN) Police Department in the late 1970s. They patrolled together, became detectives, and retired at the rank of lieutenant. Leon’s career path was in supervisory support; Mike’s was in operations.
Early on, the importance of “little black book” employee record-keeping became obvious: the notes surfaced every year, in performance evaluations.
In those reviews, Mike and Leon asked themselves the same questions most employees ask: “Why wait 6-9 months to tell us about the mistakes we had made?” “Isn’t it more effective to have immediate feedback?” “Isn’t one of the purposes of documentation to improve employee performance?” They soon realized that managing employee performance is much more of a process than an event, a daily process that includes timely feedback, informal training, counseling, guidance, etc.
Both confusing and frustrating were the sometimes drastic interdepartmental inconsistencies in the way documentation and data were recorded and maintained. Often each unit within the agency maintained its own file, and one unit could not use the input from another – even in the rare circumstances when it was available.
In the early 1990s, Leon became the APD’s accreditation manager; both he and Mike were CALEA (Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies) assessors. This exposure showed them that the problems of employee performance documentation were universal.
The officers struggled to develop or find a solution for the APD, but it became obvious that their home-grown systems and even expensive commercial systems couldn’t meet the department’s needs for comprehensive, timely, transparent, transferable, and objective employee performance documentation; nor did they provide a system that could aid “early warning” or “early intervention” programs.
In the fall of 2006, Leon clearly realized that law enforcement needed some type of software which would record and maintain employee performance documentation, while flagging possible behavior patterns for evaluation and intervention.
So, in early 2007, Leon approached accomplished software developer Nick Riggs with the problem. Riggs proposed that Leon was the best person to design the operating specifications and do the marketing of the software himself. Leon called Mike, and within a week Nick was in Anderson for a meeting; and Guardian Tracking was born.
Leon and Mike put their 60 years’ experience and notes to good use, refining and indexing their “toolbox of knowledge” to give Nick the parameters of needs: what information is important; how is information used, and by whom; what are the specific needs of a police agency?
Nick would come up with an application and Mike and Leon would test it – trying to break it, to mis-use it, to test all the corners of its envelope. Then they would report back to Nick. In addition to data, Nick wanted stories about real events and the way information is collected and how it needs to flow in an organization. Nick would write, listen, and make changes; then the process would start over again. Hundreds of hours later, “GT 1.0” was ready to test in a live environment.
The initial target customer was specific: law enforcement agencies involved in the CALEA accreditation process. In late 2007, the software was presented to the Indiana Police Accreditation Coalition. By year’s end, the advantages of GT software convinced the accreditation manager at the Carmel (IN) PD, Lt. Mike Dixon, to recommend it to Chief Mike Fogarty, which became the charter client of GT 1.0. (Fogarty has since stated that his purchase of Guardian Tracking software was “the smartest money [he] has ever spent.”)
Demonstrations of the software to the Rhode Island Police Accreditation Coalition (RI-PAC) and the Law Enforcement Accreditation Coalition of Tennessee (LEACT) led to several member agencies of those two PACs’ becoming GT clients. By March of 2008, demonstrations of GT at the CALEA meeting in Atlanta (GA) resulted in even more exposure and more clients. At the CALEA conference in Boca Raton (FL) that July, Mike and Leon noted that it was nice to meet people who had already heard of Guardian Tracking.
One of the additional features incorporated into the original GT software addressed a major gap in existing products: an early warning / intervention feature. Early intervention has become important not just to law enforcement; other potential clients were becoming aware of the need and advantages of such a feature.
Retirement: The Path to Expansion
Leon and Mike were still working for the Anderson Police Department and could not market Guardian Tracking effectively, so they both retired on May 31, 2008, with a passionate belief in their product and two clients: Carmel PD and Brentwood (TN) PD.
The “retirement plan” worked: within just one year, GT had clients in 19 states.
It wasn’t long before the founders were made to realize the universal appeal of Guardian Tracking. Human resource directors outside law enforcement wanted to know if Guardian Tracking were available for their own applications. As Mike said, “We realized that if you have employees, then you need Guardian Tracking.”
Many prospective clients, including new prospects outside law enforcement, said they needed a way to manage multiple departments without sacrificing departmental autonomy. These needs led to the development of GT2.0, launched in October 2009, featuring a “super administrator” with the ability to create multiple organizations within the same operating system. Though each department indeed “stands alone,” ensuring autonomy and privacy, all can now work together – employees who transfer have comprehensible records follow them, wherever they go within an organization.
Under the new GT2.0, each organization remains autonomous, tracking its own employees, incident categories, setting its own intervention rules. The police department sees only the police department; the fire department sees the fire department, and so on. The result is that although GT was originally developed for law enforcement and remains focused on that function, it can now cover every other department in the city, county, or other large organizations; and it works in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, and more.
Within a month of the release of GT2.0, development began on (downward-compatible) GT3. The software will continue to evolve, continuing in its prime specification of being highly functional but easy to use; and future iterations will use existing data formats, so that upgrading will not necessitate expensive additional work.
Just as a good employee performance system aids managers, future changes to Guardian Tracking software will be driven by client feedback.
Client success ultimately comes from employee success. And Guardian Tracking’s success is ensured by its clients’ success. Guardian Tracking pledges to every client to do everything possible to help them be successful with GT.
