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A smarter way to streamline the incident management process
Continuing with our series of ‘Did You know?’ articles, this month Craig Pumfrey, Director of Marketing Communications at NICE Systems - EMEA, explains how it is possible to obtain a complete visual and audible history of an incident at the click of a button…
More and more organisations have a stake in ensuring the safety and security of the public, from all of the emergency services through to the highway’s agency and transportation operators. There is increasing demand for these to work together in a smarter way to streamline the incident management process.
One of the major challenges associated with this was raised by a large number of people at BAPCO 2007 in London during April. “How do we capture, piece together, share, analyse and ultimately use the growing mass of incident related multimedia information associated with an incident?”
One of the first hurdles that must be overcome is to how to cope with the increasingly mountainous volumes of incident data that exists in wide array of multimedia formats (as IP networks continue to take hold more formats are emerging almost daily), and are stored, if at all, in isolation in standalone systems, that were not designed for interoperability.
Of course, captured interactions have always been central to reconstructing incidents and events, but today the manual process of consolidating and sharing hours of captured voice interactions (telephony, radio, VoIP), video footage, GIS information, call-taker CAD screens, crime scene photos, incident reports, emails, faxes, mug shots etc that is untaken for each and every incident is very resource intensive.
common unified systems
In order to improve emergency response and prosecute crime the ideal solution is a common unified system for capturing, consolidating and sharing all of this information. Such systems are now coming on to the market and some of which were available for demonstration at BAPCO 2007.
These systems operate in total security with a partitioned infrastructure to ensure each organisation can work independently for day-to-day operations and join up when necessary.
These incident information management systems simplify and enrich incident reconstructions and speed up material production for fast, authenticated evidence distribution, whilst making the most of existing resources and time. They enable an incident folder to be created as a single repository for all related multimedia information concerning a specific case.
Then by simply entering an incident tag, time, date or other search parameters a complete chronological, visual and audible history of an incident (including all multimedia related to the incident) can be securely delivered, viewed and heard, by authorised personnel at the desktop, laptop or PDA, whether in the office or in the field.
Revolutionary
Clearly, this also has the capacity to revolutionise the disclosure and delivery of evidence as there is no more re-recording to audiocassette tape or sending paper-based evidence by messenger or mail. The full multimedia contents of an electronic incident folder can be copied onto a CD, electronic file for email, or securely viewed by simply granting authorised users’ access to the folder.
To allay an concerns over data integrity and protection these systems have built-in functionality to automatically track who has access to specific incident folders and what their level of access is (read only or read and write), as well as a detailed audit trail, detailing each time an incident folder is opened, viewed or edited. Once an incident folder is created, it is archived and tagged with a unique file number, incident number and other reference information for historical tracking and quick look up. Online multimedia case storage and reconstruction is available instantly, once again replacing outdated tape-based storage and manual archiving.
These incident information management solutions are enabling emergency control centres to step up to the challenges and take advantage of today’s multimedia environment, to derive the insight from interactions that deliver investigators and reviewers with a 360 degree view on an incident.
