MCP Insights

DOT and DOC Grants Will Give 911 A Much-Needed Boost

Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) took the final, much-anticipated step in awarding funding dollars that have been in the works since the Next Generation 911 Advancement Act was announced seven years ago. Originally passed as part of the Middle-Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, the new $109 million grant program is intended to drive the 911 community’s transition to Next Generation 911 (NG911.)

How Public Safety Agencies are Navigating Change and Accelerating Progress

MCP’s Model for Advancing Public Safety is Helping Agencies Build a Blueprint for Today and What They Can Become

Last year, the 911 Center that serves Harford County, Maryland, was having a hard time recruiting and retaining telecommunicators, a problem that is quite common in emergency communications centers (ECCs) across the country.

APCO Preview: This Year's Hot Topic Will Be the Growing Cybersecurity Threat

During the decade that I covered the public safety communications sector for Urgent Communications magazine, I always looked forward to the national trade shows and conferences, such as the one that the Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) will host in Baltimore in a couple of weeks. In fact, I and my colleague Donny Jackson spent most of our time in the educational sessions because we felt that was the best place to learn where the sector was heading. As important, those sessions are where one learns about the sector’s biggest challenges and their potential solutions.

CASE STUDY: Supporting the National Capital Region's CAD2CAD Initiative

Background

Real-time, effective, interoperable data-sharing is essential for supporting emergency response today. For nearly a decade, jurisdictions within the National Capital Region (NCR) have benefitted from the NCR Fire and Rescue Computer-Aided Dispatch-to-Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD2CAD) Data-Exchange Hub (DEH). The DEH automates what was once a manual process in coordinating an effective mutual-aid fire department response effort.

Three Tips for Navigating Public Safety Vendor Consolidations

Vendor consolidations happen all the time across all business sectors, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is to eliminate the competition. Other times it is to expand into new markets. Still other times it is to acquire new technology—generally, it is far less expensive and time-consuming for a company to acquire technology than to develop it on its own.

The Five Biggest Takeaways from This Year’s NENA Conference

If you didn’t travel to Orlando last week for the annual National Emergency Number Association (NENA) conference, it can be summed up with one word: progress. The key themes were industry advancement and innovation with several game-changing technologies and initiatives being launched.

NENA Conference and MCP's MAPS Program Will Help Prepare You for What's Coming

After taking a look at the breakout sessions scheduled for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) trade show and conference—which will be held June 14-19 in Orlando—a clear theme immediately emerged: preparing the nation’s 911 centers for what’s coming next.

And there’s a lot coming. 

Public Safety Drones are Worth Pursuing, Despite the Challenges

The concept of drones—also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS)—dates back to August 1849 when Austrian soldiers attacked the city of Venice with hot-air balloons filled with explosives. The campaign largely was unsuccessful; in fact, ill winds blew many of the balloons back toward the soldiers who launched them.

Nearly a century later, in 1944 during World War II, Japan embarked on the little-known Fu-Go campaign that involved launching about 9,000 balloons laden with incendiary bombs; the balloons were supposed to waft across the Pacific Ocean and then start forest fires in the western United States to spark panic amongst the citizenry. This campaign also was unsuccessful.

Use the Concept of the 'Virtual Bench' to Attract A Players to your Public Safety Organization

A popular and effective supply-chain management strategy involves “just-in-time” delivery.  This approach calls for the vendor to receive goods from suppliers only when they are needed to fulfill an order. Similarly, a manufacturer would receive raw materials only when they are needed for the manufacturing process. It is a tricky thing to balance, but when done effectively the needs of customers are met nimbly and efficiently, and the company saves significant overhead costs by avoiding the warehousing of considerable inventory.

MCP uses a similar approach to ensure that we can supply our clients with the subject-matter expertise and experience they need when they need them, which we call the “virtual bench.” It’s an approach that can be embraced by all public safety organizations who are looking to find, and eventually hire and keep, high performing leaders.

In two previous posts we explained the “Topgrading” methodology. This method, developed by Dr. Brad Smart—considered by many to be the world’s foremost expert on hiring practices—is designed to identify “A” players, those who among the top 10 percent of professionals in their chosen field. At MCP, we are constantly are on the lookout for A players. But we don’t always hire them immediately upon finding a match through the Topgrading process—instead, we assign them to the virtual bench.

The Critical Role of Standards for NG911 Implementation

Throughout the design, development, and implementation of Next Generation 911 (NG911), one fundamental requirement has remained true: to achieve interoperability across the entire public safety communications ecosystem, NG911 implementations must adhere to a standard. For many years now, the 911 community has agreed that the NG911 standard is the National Emergency Number Association’s (NENA) Detailed Functional and Interface Standards for the NENA i3 Solution[1], commonly known as "NENA i3."

The first version of the standard, NENA 08-003, was ratified in June 2011. Since then, the standard was renumbered as NENA-STA-010.2-2016 when it was last updated in 2016. Later this year, NENA plans to revise the standard yet again expects American National Standards Institute (ANSI) ratification once again.

The Three Components of an Effective Vendor Support Agreement

When it comes to public safety vendor management, times have changed—dramatically.

A decade and a half ago, information technology (IT) managers and agency leadership dealt principally with a small number of support vendors. Service agreements were simple and easy to understand. Today, in stark contrast, the landscape is much different. The average agency has nearly 30 agreements—covering a plethora of systems—on which to stay current. The vendor support agreements themselves have become dramatically more complex. And many of the personalized relationships that were formed in the past no longer exist. What’s more common today is that customer support is provided by network operations centers or help desks where service and troubleshooting might be addressed by a different technician every time a new ticket is opened.

So, what does it take to be more effective at navigating the complexity of vendor support and management in today’s public safety communications environment? How can you begin to trust your maintenance and service providers again?

This Weekend's GPS Rollover Event Requires Public Safety Communication's Attention

Global Positioning System (GPS)-based time sources are used throughout the public safety sector to synchronize a wide array of systems and equipment, including radio consoles, voice recorders, and computer-aided dispatch, fire alarm and video surveillance systems. Such time sources, known as master clocks, also ensure that every system used by a public safety agency generates an accurate, consistent timestamp for every emergency event that requires a law enforcement, fire/rescue and/or emergency medical services (EMS) response.

An event that will occur in two days—Saturday, April 6—threatens to throw things out of sync, at least to some degree. GPS marks time by transmitting signals that indicate the current week and the number of seconds into that week. That data is then converted by the various systems and equipment into the more recognizable format of year, month, day and time of day.

Because the field that represents the current week is a 10-bit binary number, a total of 1,024 weeks can transpire—roughly 19.7 years—before GPS resets the week value to zero. In the world of GPS, this time period is known as an epoch. The first epoch began on January 6, 1980 and rolled over on August 21, 1999; the second epoch will roll over in two days.