PSMB is not the end state

One of the challenges that I have been grappling with as CIO of the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) — Victoria's state-wide, all-agency emergency communications call-taking and dispatch service — is how we will use high-capacity public safety mobile broadband (PSMB) networks.

Currently in Victoria we have the Mobile Data Network, a 10-year-old private network specifically for public safety data services. It has evolved since commissioning, with data usage growing slowly in the first five years and then tripling the growth rate over the next three.

The mobile broadband networks will come, and many public safety organisations globally are developing business cases for this. Whether they leverage commercial networks or private networks, the challenge many have not considered is the same as mine and needs to be addressed — we all need to develop the business cases for public safety information management in order to create increased officer situational awareness and a common operating picture, ie, getting information into the hands of the officer in the field.

Access to information adds value in a wide variety of ways, but, typically, all opportunities can be categorised into three main areas: making better-informed decisions; discovering hidden insights; and automating business processes. In public safety there is little focus on automating business processes, but much in using and sharing a wide variety of information to enable commanders and officers to make better decisions with more refined data. These, together with analysis of multiple data sources to highlight changing situations and increase situational awareness, are very valuable objectives.

At ESTA we are considering what information we gather from our call-taking and dispatch services; how we can leverage business analytical tools to use the data; and how we can analyse patterns to better understand the nature of a situation. Then we can inform commanders and officers so they can devise strategies and tactics that prevent or mitigate future harm. The business case that we are focused on is how we get that into the hands of the commanders and officers in a way that is meaningful and valuable for them. The value comes from providing the ability to monitor, alert or support interactive operational decision-making using data about current conditions and historical activity.

Other sources of data become important in this process. Social media analytics, combined with historical and current ESTA data, help to build situational awareness. For the work we do to support fire services and natural disaster management, we need to bring the meteorological data into the analytical analysis. Then there are the multiple sources of other sensor data — CCTV, police records, smart homes, telemetric, biometrics and so on. These are all at some point going to contribute to the common operating picture and situational awareness that will be delivered by the PSMB network.

Building the business case for PSMB must be developed alongside the business case for public safety information management, creating increased officer situational awareness and delivering a common operating picture. The value will not be in the network but in how we use it to improve the service we deliver to the community and the safety of our officers in the field.

Deborah Weiss spent two years as CIO of ESTA and has recently taken up the role of COO.