Mobile data for public safety

Government agencies are building a case for mobile communications and data in public safety and emergency management.

The digital transformation wave shaping all aspects of society offers vast new opportunities for Australia’s government bodies to interact with citizens. Just over a year ago, the Australian Government created the Digital Transformation Office — now itself transformed into the Digital Transformation Agency — in order to help departments and agencies to ensure better government services. This effort highlights the government’s increasing emphasis on digital service delivery.

A recent Gartner report labelled 2016 as the “year for digital tenacity” for CEOs and CIOs. The report also indicated that half of all CEOs either expect to see “substantial digital transformation” in their industries or for their industries to be “almost unrecognisable within five years”.

By 2019, Gartner expects that changes will be reflected in new customer perception of the value that digital interactions provide as a portion of government services — predicted to increase from 30% now to 46%.

As part of the digital transformation trend, emergency services and government agencies are embracing the digital approaches to ensure public safety. Australian public safety agencies and emergency services are increasingly investing in mobility and digital strategies.

For public safety agencies, mobility solutions can offer a significant range of benefits, including the ability to streamline operations, as well as ensure that in the event of an emergency, communities are provided with real-time information and resources, and field officers are kept in the field.

Successful examples

Through the use of mobile applications and websites, critical information can be put in both officers’ and the public’s fingertips. For example, Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) recently released a new website that will help communities around the state better prepare for potential threats, notify citizens of incidents and issue warnings, while also providing vital relief and recovery information. The initiative was aided by SMS Management and Technology, which developed the new version of the VicEmergency website that functions across desktop, mobile and tablets.

One of the main benefits for the EMV’s app and website users is that the map-based and mobile-responsive features can help pull information from a broader range of sources and offers much greater functionality. EMV collates the data sources in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services to ensure high availability and provide fast performance, as well as rapid scalability in emergency situations. Having scale is critical as it enables a website to continue functioning at optimal levels during the large spikes in traffic that occur during a major disaster.

Critical updates on the EMV website are delivered by push notifications through a mobile application linked to the website, while more generic information is distributed by email. This means that agencies and state or federal departments can share information more easily before, during and after an emergency.

Having this kind of situational or contextual awareness through digital technology will no doubt guarantee field officers can work more efficiently and that the public gain better and real-time access to critical information, in the face of increasing pressures to reduce costs and resources. However, more importantly, taking advantage of the big data available via public services can help public safety agencies to better predict the likelihood of certain events happening and create plans to help prepare in case of an emergency.

Queensland Police Service

Another successful example was the Queensland Police Service (QPS) in preparing for the 2014 G20 Summit in Brisbane. The QPS intelligently used its own data to predict events and generate situational awareness to ensure public safety and mitigate potential threats. The project, conducted in conjunction with SMS, used the existing enterprise Geographic Information System to improve operational planning and situational awareness during the biggest peacetime security operation on Australian soil in the nation’s history.

To secure the city of Brisbane as well as the world leaders and the community, QPS needed to have complete visibility at all times. This included a view of the locations of all 6400 assets, including every delegate, police officer, vehicle and aircraft, as well as potential hazards before they arose and the ability to quickly make changes to mitigate them.

The system boasted synchronisations with both the Department of Traffic and Main Roads (TMR) and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) to ensure real-time weather and traffic updates throughout the week-long, live operation. These needed to plug seamlessly into the secure QPS environment, while limiting access yet making it highly available to police resources.

Leveraging aggregated and relevant data that is accessible for both safety officials and the public via mobile will ultimately enable public safety agencies to better predict events, mitigate potential threats and disasters, and provide the best resources and real-time information.