pilot, it’s leading the operator through.”
Prater gives another example. “Our
new user interfaces are designed by
users for users, and having analytics
embedded seamlessly in the workows
helps provide real-time situational
awareness.” Hexagon is also working
to use machine learning to make
sense of the input from sensors out
in the eld and provide the operator
with commentary that supports their
decision-making.
However, machines are not likely
to take over from esh-and-blood
operators anytime soon. APD’s
Isherwood says that while “many
people get quite excited about AI, it’s
not as intelligent as they think. ere
are ways of using AI, but decisionmaking
isn’t one of them right now.
AI can be used to suggest, but not to
make decisions.”
An end to dark sites?
Boswell says while “a lot of people
assume that there are huge cost savings
associated with cloud”, these only
occur when the organisation has very
unpredictable and spiky irregular
demand for resources. “If you want
to use cloud resources 24/7, 365, it
becomes a more complex economic
formula.” He adds that “a lot of
organisations are still nervous about
data in the cloud, but are less so about
pushing anonymised data to cloudbased
services for analysis”.
One benet of the cloud approach,
when coupled with web and Android
clients, is its exibility. “You’re not
constrained to a desktop computer,”
Boswell adds. “You could easily
perform specic roles including
mobilisation or incident command
from a tablet. It also means that the
concept of a dedicated dark site away
from your day-to-day command
centre goes away because it’s no
longer necessary. It’s a massive cost
saving because you can virtualise
the control room and access all the
capabilities from anywhere, as long as
you’ve got the connectivity.”
Returning to my visit to
Lincolnshire Police, Andrew White,
assistant chief ocer, explained that
the force’s back-up control room is
only around 200 yards away from
the main site, “so should anything
happen to this location, our ability to
carry on operating would be severely
comprised”. In contrast, the new
Motorola solution will be accessible
via a web browser, allowing a control
room to be set up in any location with
an internet connection.
Buying well
I would be remiss if I didn’t include
some tips on procurement. Isherwood
says one common mistake is choosing
a closed platform. “Choosing a singlevendor,
closed end-to-end solution
with proprietary integrations is not
clever because it immediately creates
a problem with integrating other
things. e procurement team should
demand openly published APIs, so
that if the force or other vendors want
to integrate to that platform or share
data with it, it can be done easily,
without a signicantly large bill.”
He believes there needs to be
separation between the front-end
applications handling the workows
and the systems handling the data in
the back-end – “too often people silo
those things”.
He says: “By using the cloudbased
model where you have
common infrastructure, common
APIs for integration and datasharing,
you can write dierent
applications on top of them for
dierent workows, for dierent
people, for dierent departments and
dierentorganisations.”
He adds that “integration of
technology is very dicult to do
and tricky to maintain. Competing
technology providers have made this
increasingly dicult for agencies due to
a closed architecture approach. Public
sector technology providers must
move towards open standard interfaces
and enable sharing of data and
functionality to empower the control
room sta to work seamlessly. If we’re
not careful, public sector IT will be
unable to embrace innovations and will
become trapped by the old bespoke
technology of the past.”
Saab’s Boswell says SAFE’s single
unied platform model “ticks a lot of
boxes for customers because there are
budgetary pressures around the cost
of procurement – if you’re procuring
seven systems, that’s more expensive
than procuring a single solution.
Similarly, from an IT department
perspective, the management of
infrastructure, etc to support seven
systems is higher than to support a
single solution.”
Conversely, Prater says “it’s never
going to be one system from one
supplier that does all of this, and that’s
why we have to get the open standards
and the enterprise approach to the
solutions. It’s about multiple suppliers
coming together to provide the overall
picture. Such an eco-system approach
allows best-of-breed supplier selection
and more simple exchange of services
as and when desired, avoiding single
supplier tie-in.”
It can be easy to either aim too high
or too low. Nitsch says sometimes
people look at what is on the market
and put all the features available into
one specication, despite the fact
that no product has them all. “My
real wish would be that procurement
departments or organisations go out
and engage much more with possible
vendors, with an emphasis on getting
a demo of their solution and then
discussing how it best ts into their
operational and tactical usage.”
Boswell says that “quite often
government organisations, for reasons
that I suspect are around cost, shoot
too low. Instead of looking forward,
they try to achieve the minimum.”
He adds: “What is operationally
good practice today will not be in two
years’ time or even one year’s time, and
you need a solution that can adapt to
meet those challenges, so regardless of
the system you procure, you need a
system that can move with the times
and adapt.”
We have seen that while control
room operators are increasingly having
to deal with non-urgent matters,
the vendors that support them are
working hard to make their systems
more intuitive and exible. If the latter
leads to the technical barriers that have
frustrated data sharing in the past being
no longer an issue, it will be interesting
to see if end-user organisations take full
advantage, as part of the wider eort to
tackle organised crime.
January 2019 @CritCommsToday 19