Over 15 years he went from detention officer to cop to CIO. Now he helps public safety agencies get the most out of their mission-critical public safety systems. Meet Andy Horn, a former cop now working at Mark43.
One in ten Mark43 employees are former law enforcement or public safety professionals. Collectively, they bring more than 400 years of specialized experience to the company, and we put that experience to work every day for our customers. In this series you’ll meet some of these exceptional Mark43 employees.
Starting out as a 19-year-old detention officer for the Tarrant County, Texas Sheriff’s Office, Andy Horn moved on to join the Carrollton, TX Police Department where he served for 13 years, rising to the rank of commander. He served in a variety of specialized assignments including drug recognition, field sobriety testing & blood draw, intelligence, narcotics & crime analysis, internal affairs, field training, defensive tactics & less lethal weapons, and the bicycle unit. He left the department to become the civilian CIO for the city of Carrollton before joining Mark43. In his free time, he serves as a reserve sheriff’s deputy for the Tarrant County, Texas Sheriff’s Office.
Can you tell us about your role at Mark43
My title is Strategic Market Lead, but it’s easiest to say I work in business development. I help with our solutions architecture and the go-to-market strategy, both in our priority markets and some of our newer emerging markets. I do this for the federal space and the U.K. primarily, and secondary business development support for the U.S. It’s cross-functional work, so I could be told, “We need a partner for this opportunity,“ so then I go and help find one.
For the most part, it is developing customers. We want to deeply understand our existing markets and sometimes the way to do that is to have good conversations with people who already use the platform.
Why Mark43?
When I was promoted to sergeant, the chief assigned me to be the liaison with our new regional dispatch center. We were taking four cities and combining their dispatch into one entity. We went looking for a new Records Management System (RMS) and I became the program manager for the RMS program. We ultimately selected Mark43 RMS, and I was the project lead for implementing the RMS for the department. Fast forward ten months and we are mid-implementation. I was now the full time CIO for the city, no longer in the police department, and we got hit by a ransomware incident. Our city was significantly impacted. Mark43 was very helpful in ensuring that we had a continuity of services to the public. One night in October, after a 16-hour day where I was dealing with everything that was down I called our Mark43 implementation manager. I said, “Hey, what do you think about going live a little early?” He replied, “April?” I said “How about tomorrow?”
By the time Mark43 called back a few hours later, their team was already booking flights to come to my city and start training people how to use the RMS. A majority of people in the department had not even seen the RMS, and Mark43 was willing to make it happen within a week. That level of commitment from Mark43 stayed with me, so when I started thinking of going to the private sector, I had already seen proof that Mark43 had the ethos of serving the public sector that I wanted to be a part of.
“Something that I knew early on was that I was never the guy who would go on to cure cancer or invent a renewable energy source, but maybe someday out there on a call I can help the kid that will eventually grow up to do that. That is the kind of public service that emergency services provide on a daily basis.”
Why is mission-driven work important to you?
Number one, it’s a sense of purpose —being able to give back. There are a lot of people out there that need help, and there are many ways in which people can help. It’s all of our responsibility as members of this society to contribute somehow and this is the way that I found to be really good at it. When I went to the private sector, I knew I needed to stay involved as a reserve officer somewhere. It’s the type of service that is very hard to replicate. You are out there and you get to have a tangible impact on society, and something that I knew early on was that I was never the guy who would go on to cure cancer or invent a renewable energy source, but maybe someday out there on a call I can help the kid that will eventually grow up to do that. That is the kind of public service that emergency services provide on a daily basis.
What do you bring from your previous career to your work at Mark43?
I was blessed with the ability to have a lot of very different roles within my agency and the city, from traditional law enforcement response to overall IT service and vendor management, to critical incident response and mitigation. The ability to speak the same language as a CIO, the ability to understand the demands placed upon our public safety entities during a crisis, and knowing that they need us to be the thing that unquestionably works. How do we have that conversation and how do we provide that assurance that we are that thing for them? So they can focus on everything else they have to do, and not worry about their technology and whether or not it supports their mission during those times.
