NextGen911 – Strathcona County (Part 3)
Once Strathcona County decided to implement a ‘best of breed’ solution to deliver Next Generation 911 (NG9-1-1) service infrastructure via a competitive procurement process, it set out to implement its chosen technologies.
The municipality followed a four- step process to implement and complete their project:
- Build – creating a dedicated, highly available, redundant, and separate IT infrastructure environment, that included primary and secondary (‘backup’) sites.
- Configure – ensuring call handling, dispatch, analytics, and records management solutions would work in accordance with business requirements, processes, and legislated standards.
- Integrate – in addition to verifying the selected technologies would work together, integration with Alberta Health Services (AHS) software, fire-related emergency management systems, among many others was required.
- Test – the project team rigorously tested its new technologies, integrations, and functions, in partnership with its vendors (note: everything being tested was new to the selected vendors and TELUS).
Once complete, work will continue via a Transition Phase in September. After a successful ‘go-live’ limited to a small geography, the solution will be rolled out to the remainder of Strathcona County's 67 emergency service zones.
It will then finalize the creation of its secondary physical site. Not only will the secondary site be fully functional, but emergency services’ staff will routinely work from this facility to ensure there is ‘muscle memory’ in the event the primary site is unavailable.
Stay tuned for next week’s issue which will provide some key lessons learned from this transformative municipal initiative. [To part 4]
Contact danb [at] abmunis.ca (Dan Blackburn), Senior Director of Growth & Innovation, for more information.
