Telecommunicator-Training Guidelines: Proof that Collaboration Means Progress

Great things happen when an industry comes together as one.

Case in point: After Morgan O’Brien unveiled his idea for a nationwide interoperable broadband communications network for first responders in 2006, special interest groups soon developed within public safety concerning how the network should come about. There was so much disagreement and infighting that some feared Congress would get tired of it all, dismiss the idea, and reallocate the radio frequency spectrum needed to make the network a reality, resulting in a critical opportunity being lost forever.

Fortunately, public safety came to its senses and began to speak with a unified voice, largely due to the efforts of a group that called itself the Public Safety Alliance, and the rest is history. Congress enacted the Middle Class Tax Relief and Jobs Creation Act of 2012, which created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), and authorized $7 billion in funding for the buildout of the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network (NPSBN).

Another example of collaboration – the Telecommunicator-Training Guidelines

Another impressive example of industrywide collaboration culminated last summer when the Recommended Minimum Training Guidelines for Telecommunicators were released.

You can read more about them here.

Representatives from a diverse set of organizations—trade associations, public safety agencies, and 9-1-1 training vendors—looked past their own agendas and interests, and worked for more than three years to deliver the guidelines. Consensus-driven, these guidelines are intended to foster a baseline level of competency that will result in a more-consistent level of service being delivered to citizens and first responders, no matter where they are.

Major progress has already been made

Already the guidelines are being put to good use.

• In the state of Idaho, a law was passed last week that mandates hiring standards and 40 hours of certification training, approved by the Idaho Peace Officer Standards & Training Academy, upon being hired as an emergency communications officer/emergency services telecommunicator.  It also requires 40 hours of continuing education every two years after that to maintain the certification.
• In Minnesota, new training requirements adopted by the Metropolitan Emergency Services Board (MESB)—which covers the nine counties that surround the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul—took effect on January 1, 2017, are based on these guidelines.
• In Kansas, a revised set of standards were developed by the Kansas 9-1-1 Coordinating Council, spell out the topics that should be included in the first 40 and 80 hours of telecommunicator training, take effect next year.

Each of these efforts is approaching telecommunicator training and certification just a little differently—which was the intention behind the national-level guidelines from the beginning. While they are intended to ensure a baseline level of competency for all 9-1-1 centers nationwide, the group emphasized that 9-1-1 centers can build upon and enhance the guidelines based on local needs and circumstances. What each of the efforts described above have in common is that they used the national guidelines as a benchmark.

This week's 9-1-1 service outage: another wakeup call for 9-1-1

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On the evening of March 8^th, PSAPs in multiple states were notified that wireless AT&T customers were unable to access 9-1-1 with a voice call, or were having difficulty reaching a 9-1-1 calltaker.

It appears that the outage was extensive, perhaps nationwide, and lasted for several hours before being resolved. PSAPs in Tennessee, Texas, California, Florida, Colorado, and Pennsylvania are just a few states that publicly confirmed 9-1-1 service degradation. The full impact is still unknown at this point.

As the vendors involved work to investigate the root cause of the system failure, many within the public safety sector are beginning to reflect on the situation and how the industry can be better prepared for when—not if—a similar problem occurs in the future.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the FCC has announced an investigation that will likely to take some time to complete.

A seemingly uncoordinated effort

Many of our 9-1-1 clients reported that notifications to state 9-1-1 leaders and PSAPs were sporadic and narrowly targeted. Agencies shared bits of information via email with their colleagues as the situation unfolded. Network operation centers from service providers such as West Safety Services and Comtech forwarded notifications to some of their PSAP customers; however, many were never notified by a service provider during the incident or after the situation was resolved. The notification process and subsequent communication appeared to be an uncoordinated effort that leaves significant room for improvement.

Although requirements codified in Federal regulations (§47 CFR 4.9 - Outage reporting requirements - threshold) mandate notification to the FCC within 120 minutes for system outages, contacting affected 9-1-1 authorities is required “as soon as possible” which unfortunately is not well defined.

It's critical that the 9-1-1 community mitigate the effects and impacts associated with unplanned outages. Agencies need to prepare themselves to respond effectively to emergency situations like this outage.

time for a policy and procedure refresh

In light of the outage, Mission Critical Partners urges each 9-1-1 authority to review their local/regional policies and procedures to determine if revisions (or testing) are necessary. The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) describes contingency planning in its “PSAP Disaster & Contingency Plans Recommendations.”

A few steps we suggest include:

Four Tips to Avoid a Failed Public Safety IT Project

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This post is part one in a four-part series of posts on avoiding a derailed public safety IT project.

If you’ve been involved in a public safety system procurement in your career, you know that the process is anything but simple. Public safety system procurements are complicated undertakings that are time-consuming, risky, and often under-resourced by the agency completing the upgrade.

According to a study released by the Standish Group in 2014 published in Governing Magazine, the success rate for public sector IT projects is a mere 39%. That’s a big problem.

What can public safety agencies do to increase their success rate? We recently shared some ideas during a Mission Critical Partners (MCP) webinar (listen to it on-demand here). To help you succeed, we’ve included some of the takeaways and best practices in this article.

Because of the complexity associated with this process, we will cover these tips in a four-part series that provides a step-by-step overview of what’s important leading up to an implementation.

Read on for best practices that will increase your success in the needs assessment and develop requirements phase of your project.

Smartphone 9-1-1 applications need oversight

Looking at my smart phone, there seems to be an app for just about everything. There are apps that let you watch sporting events, movies and television shows on your device, while others provide turn-by-turn directions to your destination and tell you where the closest pharmacy is to your location. There are apps that let you receive a fake phone call when you want to extract yourself from an awkward situation, apps that enable you to locate your car when you’ve forgotten where you parked it, and apps that tell you when it’s the best time to run to the theater’s concession stand , so as not to miss the “good” part of a movie.

The rise of 9-1-1 smartphone apps

There even are apps that interconnect with 9-1-1 systems. Most are variations of the same theme:

• the user launches an app to contact 9-1-1 with the “touch of a button”
• information about the caller, including the location and pre-loaded medical history information, is transmitted with the call.
• users can even go as far as indicating the type of emergency—police, fire, medical or car crash—again at the touch of a button on some of the apps.

A few apps are focused on active shooter incidents. They enable authorized school and corporate security personnel to indicate that an active shooter incident is in progress, again with the touch of a button. The app indicates the location of the alert on a map, and while 9-1-1 is being contacted, they also alerts all federal, state and local law enforcement personnel in close proximity who have downloaded a companion responder app. According to the app developer, tens of thousands of  law enforcement personnel have downloaded their app to date.

Let’s walk before we run

The idea behind these apps is to make it faster and easier for citizens to contact 9-1-1 and to speed emergency response. It’s a great idea and the public safety community is always focused on improving outcomes for people in their time of need.

What’s not so good is that the app developers have been allowed to do their thing with little to no oversight.  Compile some code, upload it to an app store, and problem solved.  Or is it?

The Time is Now for Congress to Champion NG911

(A similar article originally appeared in Urgent Communications)

Late last year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) expressed his concerns regarding the vulnerability of today’s 911 systems to cyberattacks. He specifically cited a Ben Gurion University research study that said it would be quite easy to infect mobile phones with a bot that would unleash a denial-of-service attack on the 911 system, possibly to the degree that service could be disrupted across an entire state or even a major portion of the nation.  

The former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler responded by stating that Next Generation 911 (NG911) systems represent a solution in this regard.

No communications system can be safeguarded completely against cyberattacks—the hackers always seem a half step ahead—and NG911 systems are no exception. However, they do offer the ability to dynamically reroute emergency calls to 911 centers in the next city, county or even the next state, which would mitigate the effect of any cyberattack that would bring local operations to a halt. This ability is lacking in today’s legacy 911 systems.  

Reaching a critical limit

The most compelling part of Wheeler’s response was that FCC is “close to the limit” of what it can do to make NG911 service a reality nationwide. He called on Congress to “create national enablers to accelerate the transition to NG911.”

The enablers already exist in the form of the NG911 NOW! Coalition, which consists of leading 911 industry organizations, including

• the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies (iCERT),
• the National Association of State 911 Administrators (NASNA), and
• the National Emergency Number Association (NENA)

These organizations work alongside the NG911 Institute and other organizations to move NG911 implementation forward.

The Coalition’s goal is that all 911 centers in all 56 states and territories will have NG911 systems in place, and will have retired all legacy 911 systems, by the end of 2020.

Money is needed to make this goal a reality. A lot of it. This is why Congress must play a critical enabling role. Congress must commit to funding nationwide NG911 implementation. It can be done as demonstrated years ago when it funded nationwide broadband data network deployment.

What public safety managers don't know that can hurt them

 

Today’s law enforcement, fire/rescue and emergency medical services (EMS) and 9-1-1 agencies have numerous communications systems and applications that play a critical role in supporting their critical mission of preserving lives and property. These systems and applications often are interconnected, but they always are interrelated.

Despite this interrelation, public safety managers often do not have a holistic perspective on how these systems interact. In some cases, they aren’t even aware of all of the systems and applications that are being leveraged by the agency.

This is problematic on several levels:

• Agencies often make changes to their communications systems, for example when vendors release a new software or firmware version. If the agency does not have holistic visibility into its systems and how they interconnect/interrelate, a change can have a detrimental effect on another system. In a worst-case scenario, a change could trigger a cascading series of events that leads to one or more system failures.
• It is difficult, if not impossible, for an agency to chart a course for the future—and secure the desired funding—when it does not have an intimate, up-to-date knowledge of its systems. Said another way, how does one determine what is needed—and then convince policymakers of the need—if one is unaware of what it has, or its current condition? This becomes even more complicated when an agency has multiple PSAPs.
• Moreover, when such depth of knowledge is lacking, it is exceedingly difficult for an agency to know what questions to ask of its vendors. The result is that systems often are over- or under-engineered. 
• As previously mentioned, today’s communications systems are often interconnected. The interconnection of systems creates multiple entry/access points that can be leveraged to launch intrusive attacks. Knowing where every entry/access point exists in every system is the first step toward cybersecurity—but it is a step that cannot be taken without a deep, up-to-date knowledge of system assets.

Read to learn more about steps you can take to stengthen your knowledge of your system assets.

Navigating the new ANSI Tower Standards: What you need to know

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recorded 8 communications tower fatalities in 2015, 12 in 2014, and 13 the year before.[1] While decreasing, this is an unfortunate statistic considering the numerous industry standards available for adoption that exist to help prevent needless injuries, and even death, from occurring.