control rooms
as long as the appropriate levels of reliability and integrity can be delivered.
Open approaches For Euros Evans, chief technical offi cer at Airwave, the UK’s national TETRA-based public safety communications service provider, we’re currently embarking on a journey of major change in the way things are done at numerous levels: “Just like other sectors, we’re moving from a world where hardware and software are closely tied together – often in proprietary ways – to one that’s far more open and cloud approaches will have a role to play, though ‘clouds’ obviously mean diff erent things to diff erent people. “If we step back for a moment and look at what exactly
we’re trying to achieve for our emergency services and our communities, it’s already clear that while overall bandwidth is increasing we have to do much more to turn that data into appropriate and useful information to help support complex decision-making.” Evans and some others in the industry believe that
this is similar in many ways to what the mainstream telecommunications sector has had to do with its own back- offi ce OSS/BSS systems in recent years – those IT systems that turn a network into a hopefully functional business. T ere, valuable information was often trapped in separate system silos that had grown up over the years and the costs for integrating new systems and or introducing new processes could be crippling. Mergers, acquisitions, the roll-out of new services such as video, often relying on third parties and new devices to ever-more demanding customers, and an explosion in the amount of data to be managed in real time challenged the status quo – just at a time when both operational and equipment budgets were being cut. On top of that, the ‘fi rst responders’ – the expensive repair
and maintenance technicians out in the fi eld – were being confronted by far more complex problems than ever before that had to be resolved in ever-shorter timeframes. All in all, it was a fragmented and almost craft-based systems environment – rather than one that was truly automated with clearly defi ned workfl ows. In this setting, a huge amount of time and energy has been spent by organizations such as the TM Forum in defi ning and standardizing terminology, processes and workfl ows to help vendors and operators streamline and integrate their operations, introduce new software frameworks and eliminate unnecessary baggage and costs.
Increasing integration “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 diff erent 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.” T is is a perspective supported by Martin Worrell,
technical director at the control room systems supplier APD Communications – who also sees great potential for new
Issue 6 2012 TE TRA TODAY
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 Offi cers (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 effi ciency. “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. T ese 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. T is strategy is especially valuable in identifying crime hotspots or supporting communities suff ering repeated anti-social behaviour.”
Analysing the workfl ow T e 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 workfl ow throughout an incident’s lifecycle and fi nd ways in which you can improve the richness of the integration and interworking between the diff erent 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? T is would include, for example, information on whether fi rearms 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. T is also contributes to helping de-risk things for the responders. T ere’s also the additional benefi t of being able to handle information fl ows in the other direction so that offi cers
23
“A lot of thought has to go into standardizing shared processes and the presentation of information”
Picture: Airwave
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