Digitally Transforming 911: 3 Operational Challenges to Consider

June 8, 2022 · John McDonnell

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Digitally Transforming 911: 3 Operational Challenges to Consider 

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June 8th, 2022

Written by John McDonnell, Public Safety Sales Director

Blog, Public Safety

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Creating frictionless PSAP operations is no simple task. There are a multitude of factors to consider, including the fact that the environment is mission-critical; peoples’ lives are on the line if operations aren’t running smoothly.   

As defined by NICE, digital transformation is the strategic adoption of digital technologies. It’s used to improve processes and productivity, deliver better citizen and employee experiences, manage risk, and control costs. On a fundamental level, it changes how your agency operates and delivers value to stakeholders (like citizens, employees, politicians, and partnering agencies). It’s a cultural change that requires leadership to recognize that, just because we have always done it this way, doesn’t mean it’s correct.  

We identified three key aspects of PSAP and 911 operations that can be impacted by adopting a digital transformation strategy:  

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• Incident reconstruction and producing evidence  

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• Performance tracking  

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• Quality assurance program  

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We’ll take you through the factors associated with each of these operational topics and provide an example of how adopting NICE Public Safety solution into your PSAP can improve those functions.  

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Incident Reconstruction & Producing Evidence  

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Reconstructing incidents and producing evidence is tedious, labor intensive, and takes up a lot of resources in your center. Let’s face it, the incident life cycle is becoming more and more complex. Here are a few common operational challenges that arise in incident reconstruction:  

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1. 1. 1. 1. The volume of requests from different stakeholders (prosecutors, detectives, FOIA, incident response teams, etc.) continues to increase 
         2. Fulfilling requests is a manual and time-consuming process 
         3. Critical 911 staff are required to locate and reconstruct an incident 
         4. Long turnaround times frustrate requestors and jeopardize timely justice 
         5. Difficulty managing media files for sharing, including redactions and audio transcription 
         6. Commonly DVD or USB based, which requires physical tracking and delivery 
         7. No visibility or auditability of the process 

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The City of Detroit was experiencing these challenges. They were missing text, screen, and CAD communications and needed to navigate different systems to piece recordings and data together. Because of this, it was difficult to understand the full context of what happened.  

After adopting their NICE solution, the City of Detroit streamlined their incident reconstruction by automatically pulling and assembling incident events and call, radio, and text communications in a timeline. This resolved the backlog from growing requests, helped them overcome the inefficiencies associated with incident reconstruction, and relieved key personnel that reconstruction was dependent on. 

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Performance Tracking  

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Understanding how the center is performing is typically reported after the fact. There’s no real or near real-time visibility into performance. We’ve seen PSAPs focus a lot of time and effort on two metrics: how many calls they’re getting and how fast they’re answering them. But there is much more happening in a center than answering calls. There’s entering that data into the CAD system, dispatching, partnering with other agencies, and more.   

In the City of Detroit, reporting was manual and time-consuming. It delayed insights, which impacted their ability to understand what was going on in their center and quickly resolve any issues.   

With NICE, they experienced much quicker and better results for performance tracking:  

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Greater self-reflection and support of front-line telecommunicators so they can be successful  

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More balanced performance metrics can monitor all stages of incidents, beyond focus on call response times  

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Enhance staff performance and satisfaction  

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Understand types of calls telecommunicators are taking and their impact  

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Identify early warning signs in incident response and dispatch and mitigate issues before they escalate and become a liability  

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Improve the level of service to citizens  

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The goal for the City of Detroit was improving the level of service to their citizens. Instead of waiting until the next month to see if they had accomplished that goal, they had visibility into their performance and equipped their telecommunicators with more training and resources to become better.  

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Quality Assurance Program  

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In many cases, PSAP leadership does not have enough time to address quality assurance and do it the way they want to. Like incident reconstruction and performance tracking, it’s a manual and time-consuming process that relies on multiple systems and printouts. Understanding the ‘why’ for something that’s being labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is nearly impossible.  

Before NICE, the City of Detroit was unable to rapidly detect and properly diagnose issues that could turn into crises. They had no good way of finding the most coachable calls or those calls that posed greater liability 

Instead of focusing on problems when they arose, the City of Detroit used their NICE solution to create a more proactive approach to 911 Quality Assurance:  

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Immediate diagnosis and coaching of problematic patterns from telecommunicators’ calls  

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Context into why decisions were made when evaluating multimedia communications synched with screen and CAD data  

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Better able to uncover and resolve systematic issues  

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Use targeted QA to focus more heavily on a certain subset of calls

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As next gen 911 and the concept of digital transformation develop in 911, finding solutions and service providers to help you achieve operational excellence is of the utmost priority. The City of Detroit experienced a significant operational shift with the adoption of NICE as a partner. Paired with the technical knowledge and availability of the Wilmac team, you’re sure to improve PSAP operations and have a grasp on everything going on in your center.  

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Contact Wilmac today to set up an initial discovery meeting where we’ll work together to understand your PSAP’s goals and figure out the best course of action for you and your center.

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