11-15-17 Information and Technology & Health and Public Safety

Home Browse Search

fall within the national average. We are less than one hundred and twenty(120) seconds on the EMS side and less than ninety (90) seconds on the Fire side. Where we have been struggling is getting our streets and locations to validate in our GIS software. We have been meeting with folks from GIS from all of the different entities to identify common issues to address and fix them. There has been a lot of finger pointing as to why we are in the situation we are in. The New World folks don't want to take any responsibility whatsoever, and our team has been fed to the sharks on this deal. They were given a huge document to work off of and there really haven't been any boots on the ground from the New World folks on training. The most important piece of CAD is GIS,hands down. They haven't been very responsive to addressing our concerns. He continued, That being said, we've had a representative from New World for three (3) days this week who is analyzing our systems top to bottom, front to back. She is helping us identify some opportunities and risks within the center. She is doing a comprehensive analysis of exactly the way we do business and where we are falling short so we can improve. In the past,the center has had people come in to do training at various times. This analysis is all inclusive to all aspects of the function of the center. We have taught our supervisors and the supervisors are now training their own folks. If we can shave forty-five (45) seconds,that is a big deal for us. During the build time for our software folks,there wasn't a lot of continuity. We have a huge call center but we were also tasking those same workers to build the large data base. So we had a few people sporadically building a database. We are addressing our response plans and how things are built because when you start throwing stuff at a data base,the more it has to sort,the longer it takes, which increases the chance of error. Some of it is complicated by necessity, and some of it is over complicated that we can fix. We've identified the different complexities. With more time, we will get better. Right now we are sitting, on average, at about three (3) minutes from call received to out the door. It is about a minute and a half of interrogating callers and a minute and a half of street validations. We do have some room for improvement. The good news is that once the team gets better, we see that immediately. Our GIS team is being very responsive to spotting errors in street validation. We have a lot of good teamwork from many different agencies working to solve these issues we face. Committee Chair Scott stated, One (1) of the concerns we have had since the beginning of this is the street validation and even City validation because I know there is a 711 Forest Avenue in South Bend and also a 711 Forest Avenue in Mishawaka. Ms. Schultz replied, Our folks have been in only their respective agency so the question `What city are you in?' was not a common practice before. That is now fully integrated into our CAD. Committee Chair Jo M. Broden asked, So how are you driving your cross-training between all the different channels like Police, Fire and EMS? Mr. Schultz replied, We are tackling that in a couple of different ways. First is the immersion therapy with folks already there. So we are scheduling times for trainers to sit with our folks until they are cleared for a specific agency. However right now it is still specific agencies. Someone could be cleared on Mishawaka you may not be cleared on South Bend. We are building a system to address that. We are way too far into this system to not have enough people doing everything. It now turns into a chicken or the egg situation. We have new people that are training 2