The Office of Technology Management (OTM) develops and manages information technology systems for the Maryland State Police Department. The OTM actively pursues grants related to information technology enhancements that help officers perform their jobs better, while reducing total cost of ownership, saving time, improving communications, and increasing officer safety.

In 2004, with the intention of capitalizing on mobile computing, the OTM deployed its first notebook computer in an officer’s vehicle. The presence of a PC in the police vehicle opened up new opportunities and challenges for the department. And later, with the availability of wireless networks and the internet, a few pioneering people in the OTM had an idea to utilize the connected mobile platform to help officers improve their job performance and safety on the road through electronic traffic citations.

The primary activity for many troopers is stopping traffic violators. In a routine traffic stop, the bulk of the officer’s time is spent writing tickets with a pen and paper. The OTM, with insight from two troopers, crafted the Electronic Traffic Information Exchange (E-TIX), a new application for the Vehicle Citation process that would take advantage of mobile computing capabilities. In August 2007, the E-TIX pilot program started with 15 troopers entering all citation data into the onboard system. During the seven month pilot program, 15,000 traffic violations were entered into the system and were transferred successfully to the District Court.

As the pilot program unfolded, the need for an automated update process was quickly recognized. While the pilot was manageable with only 15 troopers, the manual update process employed during the pilot simply would not scale, as the troopers needed to come off patrol and wait as the software improvements and fixes were applied.

The information technology group initially set out to develop a custom update application for E-TIX, but the task proved to be larger than initially anticipated, so the search for a proven commercial solution began.

Rather than build an updating solution with all the capabilities needed, it was decided to search out the best solution that would be user friendly, easy to implement, and deployable without trooper involvement.

Their search uncovered AppLife Update. “We needed a solution that allowed the troopers to stay on patrol, was easy to use, and had the capability and the flexibility to function in our mobile computing environment,” said Corporal Chris Corea, of the Maryland State Police. “The E-TIX software is updated as often as bi-monthly, and AppLife Update made our job simple. We knew we had found a solution that would keep the troopers on the street and have a lower cost of ownership than other commercial options.”

AppLife Update is integrated directly into E-TIX, a Visual Basic .Net application, and periodically checks for software updates. If an update exists, the update is downloaded in the background and performed without any trooper involvement. The updates utilize the AppLife Update Engine and Update Actions to perform the software update activity on the deployed notebooks.

In AppLife Update, the Maryland State Police found a solution with the features needed to easily create their own Update Manager and take back control of their application maintenance deployment requirements. The goals of the process – simplification and cost control – were achieved, and the ultimate customer, the trooper, no longer needs to waste valuable patrol time waiting on software updates.

The return on investment was realized immediately. The information technology team saved countless hours in development time, eliminated 90% of the time it took to build and prepare each individual update (from 60 minutes to 5 minutes), and keeps the 2000 officers across 50 state agencies using E-TIX updated and available to keep the Maryland citizens safer.

Kinetic Jump Software provides comprehensive and innovative solutions that help software teams advance iterative development practices through improved specification authoring and automated software updating. The AppLife® solutions are deployed worldwide in over 30 countries, by corporations, government, and private industry.