THE LATEST FROM THE EMERGENCY SERVICES NETWORK (ESN) FORUM

Yesterday saw representatives from Lead Organisations who provide vital systems to the UK’s emergency services, the Home Office and representatives from Emergency Services organisations (Ambulance, Fire and Police) join together at the Motorola Innovation offices in London for the next session in the Emergency Services Network (ESN) workshops and Airwave DCS.

These forums occur every six weeks to talk through the operational requirements and ensure they are included as part of the design and development process for Kodiak and all systems that will be used by Emergency Service Providers from capturing the voice conversations across multiple platforms and devices, through to the ICCS (incident command and control) and CAD (computer aided despatch) solutions.

During these sessions key personnel meet to collaborate and work through functionality requirements, potential challenges they envisage and to also highlight areas where additional features may be needed based on what they understand from their customers and their working practices today.

Working with over 70% of the UK’s police forces and part of 3 Lead Organisation trial processes, these workshops are an essential part of our process to ensure we fully understand the new Emergency Services Network, what our organisation needs from the network and how our solution needs to work to support our customers fully.

In yesterday’s session we were focused on how operational statuses would be communicated through the new platform to the relevant end point. This was a lively discussion with multiple scenario’s presented and debated to make sure the core functionality requirements were fully scoped within the planned work and all relevant standards were being met from the outset.

Transition to the ESN is due to begin in just over 18 months will the full rollout to be completed in 2022, these workshops are working to key milestone dates to ensure all organisations who supply solutions to the Emergency Services in the UK are able to update and tweak their current offerings in line with this project.

Regarding transition options to Airwave DCS and sustainability of the current Airwave system, we will be encouraging our public safety customers to engage with Airwave to understand their best options and in line with this we will ensure we continue to integrate to Airwave throughout this process.

With the next meeting just 6 weeks away we alongside some of our key partners in public safety have plenty to be looking at and planning development requirements so we are armed ready for the ESN.