“It’s a real journey of transformation that we’re talking about here in terms of technologies, processes and the increasing integration that needs to happen”, Airwave’s Evans comments. “In the UK, for example, we’re seeing ever-greater collaboration between the different emergency services themselves. In some situations, this involves the sharing of call centre resources between regions and services in the case of call overload or other problems. While this is pretty straightforward in technology terms, a lot of thought has to go into standardizing shared processes and the presentation of information.”

This is a perspective supported by Martin Worrell, technical director at the control room systems supplier APD Communications – who also sees great potential for new technologies to both enhance relationships with the wider community as well as develop new tools for the emergency services to exploit.

“In these cost-focused times, there’s a lot that public safety services can do using smart telemetry solutions to monitor and manage their vehicles and driver behaviour in much better ways. We ran a trial in 2011 with the UK’s Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to show how using an approach like our Driver Vehicle Management System to capture a wide range of data about vehicle usage could deliver major cost savings both in fuel costs as well as vehicle and driver efficiency.

“In terms of improving relationships with communities”, he adds, “we’re also seeing an increasing commitment by the emergency services to what are essentially CRM (customer relationship management) systems, able to reach across multiple systems, co-ordinate responses and provide feedback. These can track and manage incidents in a number of ways and communicate appropriate information out to people out in the community through a variety of media, providing a consistency and continuity often absent in the past. This strategy is especially valuable in identifying crime hotspots or supporting communities suffering repeated anti-social behaviour.”

Analysing workflow

The similarity to the mainstream telecoms environment is also echoed by Matthew Palmer, product manager at Capita Secure Information Systems. He said: “You’ve really got to look at the whole workflow throughout an incident’s lifecycle and find ways in which you can improve the richness of the integration and interworking between the different processes involved – for example, how can you draw relevant data from other systems – which may not be actually owned and managed by the emergency service organization – and send it to the responder while they’re en route to the incident?

This would include, for example, information on whether firearms are held at the address, if there are vulnerable people there with health issues or if there’s already an incident history at that particular address. This also contributes to helping de-risk things for the responders. There’s also the additional benefit of being able to handle information flows in the other direction so that officers for example can book custody suites while on their way to the
police station.
“You can draw a parallel with other sectors”, he adds, “only in this case the ‘middle office’ is the control room while the ‘back office’ hold all the data. The problem is that often these systems have come from different vendors and run on different platforms and so we have to find ways of getting these to interact in more efficient ways.”

Sobriety returns

This drive for greater efficiency and lower costs at a time of major technology change is hitting numerous countries around the world. Jeff Gillan, product business manager for Cassidian in North America comments, “Public safety services in this region are far more fragmented than, for example, in Europe and there are many additional challenges to do with funding, staffing and legal jurisdictional issues above and beyond the technology itself.

“In the US alone there are effectively around 6500 control centres ranging from very large urban ones to tiny ones in small rural areas and proposed changes in this environment raise issues to do with territorial rights and responsibilities. There are also staffing issues involved in terms of who is legally allowed to carry out certain tasks – such as reviewing CCTV evidence which may contain potentially traumatic images.”

He also cautions strongly against applying technology for technology’s sake without clearly understanding how it is going to be used – another lesson from the world of mainstream telecom.

“While it’s true that we’ve quickly moving to a far more data-centric world, it’s essential to understand that these fashions can often move very quickly in a pendulum-like fashion. For example, a few years ago a lot was being talked about the need to support SMS in the emergency services environment; fortunately some sobriety has returned!
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