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Entries » Blog » Architect a Plan for the New Realities of Public Safety Communications Author: Bob Schassler

Architect a Plan for the New Realities of Public Safety Communications Author: Bob Schassler

Created Apr 11 2014, 5:00 AM by Paul Jeffs

Over the course of my career, I have had the unique opportunity to meet with public safety customers around the world. What’s interesting is that no matter the size of their organizations or their location, they face the same challenges. And I hear the same question again and again, "How will technology help keep my citizens safer?"


To answer this question, we need to consider the rapidly changing operational landscape for public safety agencies. Two of the biggest new realities are the ever-increasing volume of data and the growing complexity of devices and networks available.


Data Requirements
Big data is changing how government and public safety works. It drives decisions and helps allocate resources. But almost daily, there are new kinds of big data to contend with. Police departments understand that fixed and mobile video are critical to the evidentiary process; however, an agency may have only one analyst watching 1,500 camera feeds and may struggle with effective ways to store and share all of the data. Social media has transformed citizen expectations, but emergency call centers are not prepared to handle the flood of new information, let alone process texts, photos and videos. Data is important – 89 percent of public safety decision makers (1) agree that mission critical data is as important as voice communications – but so is managing it.


The Need for Mission Critical Networks
Every agency should have a plan for public and private network communications. The weight given to each network depends on agency requirements. The disasters over the last few years have proven that public carrier networks are not designed to be mission critical. You need to find a balanced approach that will give you the reliable, always-on connectivity required to keep citizens and cities safe. A mission-critical architecture provides that, along with the security to keep networks, devices and data access secure.


The Right Plan

Today, you have all this data, volumes and volumes of it, much of it unstructured. You also have a wide range of network issues to deal with as a result. You may be thinking: "I need a plan, what’s my plan? What will my needs be five years from now? How will I connect the dots and get where I need to be?" It’s important to have a plan in place to figure out how to get there. That plan needs to answer a few key questions:

  • How do you get unstructured data into a structured format? How do you turn data into intelligence? What analytics are required?
  • How do you get only the most relevant information to responders so they can make better proactive decisions? How do you integrate applications?
  • How do you ensure the mission critical performance of your networks, applications and devices? What can you live without should a carrier network fail?


Mission critical technology plays an important role in architecting that plan. It should be tailored to your agency needs, flexible enough to adapt and evolve with you as those needs change, easy and cost-effective to migrate over time, and intuitive to how public safety works – both in the command center and out in the field. At the end of the day, it really comes down to using the data you have to do your job better, be more proactive and work more efficiently.


My development team at Motorola continues to look for ways to use technology to keep responders and citizens safe. With our VALR™ Mission Critical Architecture, we enable agencies to collect, correlate and share data between existing systems, responders in the field and other agencies – helping to improve response and keep cities safer.


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Bob Schassler is Motorola's senior vice president for Government Solutions.


Learn more about how our VALR Architecture can help your organisation.


This article was originally posted in ‘Fresh Ideas for Public Safety’


Join the Motorola Solutions Community EMEA at

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Motorola-Solutions-Community-6519590/about

Sources:

(1) Motorola Public Safety Data Communications Technology Survey, January – February 2012

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