Why COOP/DR Plans Need to Consider GIS Data Maintenance

A couple of weeks ago, MCP’s Richard Gaston posted about why it is critically important for every public-safety agency, regardless of size and resources, to have continuity-of-operations plans (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans in place. This post addresses an element that is lacking in many such plans, a gap that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus—geographic information system (GIS) data maintenance.

For decades, location of 911 callers was determined solely by querying the master street address guide (MSAG) and automatic location identification (ALI) tabular databases. About a quarter century ago, GIS-generated data entered the picture—quite literally—as computer-aided dispatch (GIS) system mapping applications began to leverage it to depict 911-caller locations on the map display on telecommunicators’ screens. In the Next Generation 911 (NG911) environment, GIS data will play an even bigger role, because geospatial data will replace MSAG and ALI data as the primary means of locating 911 callers.

Assessing Progress Towards Next Generation 911 is No Easy Task

In 2015, while beginning work on the Next Generation 911 (NG911) Nationwide Cost Study for the National 911 Program, it became apparent that the first step was to determine the extent of implementations across the country. Only then could the team define what would be needed to fully implement NG911, from coast to coast, and the ultimate cost.

Pandemic Underscores Importance of Public Safety Continuity-Of-Operations and Disaster-Recovery Plans

COVID-19, aka the coronavirus, pandemic is grabbing a lot of attention right now, partly because we don’t see global pandemics in the United States very often, certainly not one of this gravity. But we do see other significant events on a fairly regular basis— e.g., wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, hazardous materials spills, network outages—that can disrupt or halt public safety operations.

Women in Public Safety Communications Have Come a Long Way

In this installment in our Women in Public Safety series in honor of Women's History Month celebrated in March, MCP Insights chats with Christy Williams, director of NCT9-1-1 in Arlington, Texas, and a past president of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). Williams shares her insights regarding the challenges she faced as a woman over her career in a male-dominated industry, and how she overcame them on her rise to leadership positions at the local, state and national levels.

Eight Tips for Protecting Public Safety Organizations Against Phishing

In this recent post on cybersecurity training, we explained why it is one of the most crucial tactics government agencies for cyberrisk prevention—specifically, we highlighted how phishing messages can infect and ultimately bring down an entire mission-critical communications network. With email being such a widely used form of communication, malicious-threat perpetrators are increasing in quantity and sophistication by the minute, looking to take advantage of email’s prevalence in order to exploit it. Statista reports that more than 55 percent of emails sent are considered spam, and many of them contain phishing exploits.

Strategic Planning for Public Safety

The expectations placed on public safety agencies increase every day—from doing more with smaller budgets and fewer staff to improving communications between dispatchers and emergency responders in the field, to decreasing response times and improving response outcomes. In today’s constantly evolving emergency communications landscape, the public sector can take a cue from private organizations and prioritize initiatives, goals and ideas through strategic-plan development.

Security Training: A Key Element of a Strong Cyberrisk Prevention Program

According to a recent report by Crowdstrike, cybersecurity threats to state and local governments increased in sophistication in 2019. While there have been improvements in how government agencies detect attacks, assailants continue to be relentless and inventive in their efforts to find IT infrastructure gaps that can be exploited. In a highly complex digital environment full of cybercriminals looking to exploit your organization’s vulnerability, a self-inflected wound can be especially frustrating.

URL Integration Acquisition Bolsters MCP’s Data-Integration Capabilities

When we launched MCP a little more than a decade ago, we established some pretty aggressive growth goals, especially for a firm that was operating out of a garage and had no clients at the very beginning. Nevertheless, each goal was met with room to spare. Our ability to do so hinged on a single, overarching, inflexible focus on delighting the client.

Webinar Next Week to Explore Public Safety Broadband and NG911 Integration in ECCs

For decades, public safety has suffered from a siloed approach to implementing communications networks, one that has made interoperable communications an extremely challenging, costly and time-consuming endeavor, and in some cases, a proverbial “mission impossible.” An opportunity exists to flip the script, one that MCP will explore in depth in a new live webinar scheduled to be held on October 31 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern/11 a.m. Pacific.

Client Success Story: Memphis Police and 911 Communications Enjoy a Remarkable Rebirth

Challenge

With the third-highest homicide rate amongst the 50 largest cities, it’s easy to see that the Memphis Police Department needs every possible resource at its disposal. But as recently as three years ago, its emergency communications capabilities were in shambles. The communications infrastructure was aging and had been neglected for at least a decade. Maintenance was substandard for many of its systems and all were several releases behind in terms of their operating software. The department needed to address computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems that had reached end of life. Critical servers were out of drive space.

The 911 center was understaffed and plagued by archaic policies with emergency callers waiting for as long as seven minutes before their call was answered. “We were in bad shape,” says Michael Spencer, the police department’s emergency communications administrator. “There was a lot wrong. We were doing things every day just to keep things running.”

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.

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?