Disruptive technologies are ‘absolutely a necessity’

In a session held during last week’s Conference for Advancing the Public Sector (CAPS), panelist Charles Werner stated that it is “absolutely a necessity” for public-sector organizations to pursue disruptive technologies. “It’s what makes us better,” said Werner, director of Drone Responders and the former chief of the Charlottesville (Virginia) Fire Department and former chair of the Department of Homeland Security’s SAFECOM committee.

So, what make a technology disruptive? A simple way of thinking about it is that once a disruptive technology emerges and achieves widespread adoption, nothing is the same again. Numerous examples easily can be found over the last century or so, starting in 1921 when William Rutledge, police commissioner for the city of Detroit, began experimenting with mobile radios installed in cruisers. A decade later, in 1933, the Bayonne, N.J., police department became the first in the U.S. to institute two-way radio communications between a police station and cruisers in the field.

In 1968, more disruption occurred when the 911 system was launched in Haleyville, Alabama, and then again in the 1990s when computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems started to be implemented by law-enforcement agencies. More recently, public-sector infrastructure has begun to move to the cloud to take advantage of the resiliency, flexibility, and scalability that this environment offers.

Today, drones certainly qualify as disruptive technology, as does artificial intelligence. Both already are having significant impact on the public-safety sector, the former in terms of situational awareness (which is just one of many use cases) and the latter in terms of providing the ability to handle nonemergency calls, which in turn speeds emergency response and eases the burden on 911 telecommunicators.

But disruptive technologies, despite their promise for changing the game, aren’t always embraced immediately and often not for quite a while. Change does not come quickly or easily to the public sector, especially public-safety agencies, and for good reason. Networks, systems, devices, and applications need to work without fail, and officials and first responders — including those in 911 centers — must be confident that they will.

CAD serves as a prime example of this phenomenon. It first was developed in the 1960s but took about three decades to find its way into 911 centers. The prevailing sentiment for a long time seemed to be that the legacy run-card system worked just fine, so why change?

“We're dealing with saving lives and property, so we can't just gamble on [disruptive technologies],” said panelist Christy Williams, director of North Central Texas Emergency Communications District (NCT911). But Williams, well known throughout the public-safety sector as an early adopter of disruptive technologies, quickly added that they indeed should be pursued, but perhaps with a crawl-walk-run approach. “Take something small, get a win, and prove that trust,” she said.

An ideal way to go about that is to conduct pilot projects, which give personnel a chance to see the benefits of the new technology in real time and then to adjust to it. Another good idea is to implement a change-management program. (An aside: CAPS also featured a session on the value of change management and how to go about it.) Technology adoption requires a well-thought-out strategic approach that engages personnel early and shows them how the new technology will make their jobs easier and/or make them more proficient.

This blogs only scratches the surface of what Werner and Williams — who were joined by Bob Finney, director of the Collier County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office, and Bonnie Maney, MCP’s 911 operations manager — discussed regarding disruptive technologies in this session, one of 11 presented during the conference. If you missed it, the sessions will be archived at MCP’s website through the end of the year — click here to access them. I urge you to so — I am confident that you will find the conference to be valuable and time well spent.

Glenn Bischoff is MCP’s content specialist and moderator of the disruptive-technologies panel discussion.