Why Doesn’t Government Get Emergency IT?
David Aylward, September 26, 2008
Achieving integrated and interoperable emergency response systems requires that the participants connect at the transport layer (communications pipes connect) and at the application layer (simplistically, software and its interactions). (For purposes of clarity of discussion, I am simplifying to two layers in the stack).
For the past several years, in the emergency space there has tended to be a very strong focus on the transport layer, almost ignoring the application layer. This translates into "building interoperable emergency networks and systems" as opposed to "linking legacy systems with software." The first is very expensive, and can't be the solution anyway as all the relevant organizations are never going to all be on the same network, using the same radios. But yet we continue to pour billions of dollars into building new pipes, while starving the application side.
In industry terms (again simplistically), we have been choosing the telecommunications industry over the information technology industry.
The commercial and military worlds are way, way ahead of what I call the "virtual safety enterprise". They are well down the road towards network-centric operations, cloud computing, managed services, service oriented architectures, and the like.
This imbalance is a very, very big deal because the only way to make rapid progress on inter-domain, inter-jurisdictional, and inter-everything else safety information sharing is to focus on the application layer: convert every communication into Internet Protocol and focus on what needs to happen "in the middle" and with "interfaces to the middle" instead of the end points (what happens in and at different agencies). (That doesn't mean transport is unimportant, but we already have lots of it, in lots of different flavors. My argument is not to ignore it, but to have balance.)
I have been ruminating on why we have this imbalance. Why do so many in the Executive Branch, the FCC, and emergency response communities make this choice, focusing almost solely on transport: in talking, writing, policy making and grant making?
It struck me that the answer is in our history since around 1978.
"Communications" has been under the purview of government for a long time. Information technology mostly grew up outside of government (DARPA aside). So people in government in this area learned communications; IT has been a side show.
I grew up professionally with a Congress and FCC that focused on wired and wireless pipes. All our discussions and debates were about the pipes. The great battles of the 1970s and 1980s over competition were about competition in telephony. In the late 1970s, in the Computer II decision, the FCC explicitly declined to regulate information technology, information services. Those were "those other things". From time to time it has drawn the same line deeper and deeper.
And until recently, the IT industry was very happy to grow up in California and elsewhere and not have to go to fundraisers for Congressmen every night.
"Public safety" at the FCC for decades has meant (almost solely) spectrum for radios for first responders. Thus, we have witnessed a great debate in and around the FCC this year about developing an "interoperable wireless broadband network for public safety." (It seems to have escaped the attention of many that safety agencies don't exchange much data today, much less with the field, much less amounts of data that require broadband.) Almost every time a reporter writes on the topic or a Congressman addresses it, they note it will be a solution to the first responder interoperability problem. Little to no attention has been paid to the critical application layer issues that would allow data to start flowing between agencies on the broad band networks that already exist. Nor has the government made a top priority the application layer issues needed to link legacy radio and wired networks to each other, much less to the new P-25 digital trunked radio systems that billions of our tax dollars are being spent for, much less this new broadband network if and when it gets built. (But kudos to the small progress being made due to grassroots leadership).
The FCC isn't just regulatory. It controls large amounts of money. It recently announced it was spending over $400 million of the Universal Service Fund on rural medical networks -- every one of which was mostly new transport capacity.
When DHS was formed and initially reached out to the traditional first responder community, not surprisingly it got the same communications-focused answers. Its policies ever since have reflected this. Billions of dollars are being spent directly and through the states and localities to buy new emergency networks (mostly radio); a few tens of millions have been spent on application layer issues (and mostly on end point, or area specific, applications, which should not be a priority).
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce is about communications and spectrum. So when Congress handed it the lead role on the special $1 billion in "interoperability grants", what did it do? It let those one time dollars be spent almost entirely to buy new radio networks. After major lobbying, software solutions were allowed and cost/benefit analysis would have required them, but NTIA had no stomach for that. This was in part because it does not have a great deal of IT expertise, and that is because it doesn't have real IT jurisdiction.
The safety market is relatively small, and so balkanized in its decison making and purchasing (120,000+ individual agencies), that it is not an easy market to crack. Nor are the individual domains (EMS, 9-1-1, fire, police, transportation, emergency management) calling for integrated emergency information services amongst all of them. Nor can I find anyone in power in government taking that overall view. After all, as discussed above, most of those in government have communications training and responsibilities. Federal budgets and programs are about communications. The government IT people are generally elsewhere.
So it has been simple for the big IT players, who now have large DC presences, to mostly ignore the safety market.
If Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or their ilk took on the safety market, treated it like a virtual enterprise, and developed standards-based managed application layer services for it, could they cause huge leaps forward in service to the public in emergencies large and small (and major overall cost savings)? Absolutely. Could they make a pile of money breaking down the wall between the public and emergency response (e.g. making sure my health records stored at Google were available to 9-1-1, EMS and the trauma center when I get hurt). You bet.
But from their perspective, sacrificing the small submarket today and a larger potential future one are cheap prices to pay to avoid the federal world the telcos have to inhabit. Plus they have a lot of other things to do.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
NPR Leads A Web Response to Gustav
Here is an interview from National Public Radio's news service which I thought was worth sharing. Using his experience from Katrina, NPR's lead Web 2.0 guy, Andy Carvin, has led a crash effort of volunteers to provide various informational support services for the response to Hurricane Gustav. David Aylward
September 2, 2008
NPR's Andy Carvin on the Role of Social Media in Gustav Coverage
Al Tompkins
Andy Carvin's job, as the senior strategist for social media at NPR, is to build bridges between NPR and its fans and social network users on places like Twitter and Facebook. Carvin once defined "a truly great blog" as a place where a community forms, and where members find themselves almost compelled to join the conversation.
NPR's Andy Carvin
For Hurricane Gustav, he has led 500 volunteers putting together the Gustav Information Center, which includes a Wiki and a site called "Voices of Gustav." The Voices site is set up to accept calls from people who have been displaced, with the idea that volunteers would transcribe the calls and post them online in a searchable format. That effort tapped into the Utterz Web site. The effort includes three Twitter feeds including GustavAlerts, which is a breaking weather feed. GustavNews follows news stories and GustavBlogs focuses on how blogs are reporting the storm. Another another team of 50 or so volunteers is working on transcribing reports from ham radio operators and other radio scans.
You will notice, by the way, that nowhere on the Gustav Information Center do you find an NPR logo, a link to NPR or any mention of NPR at all. It is a product by the people and for the people.
Carvin tells me that he thinks of Twitter as a citizen generated wire service while the wiki is more like a reference desk.
Several times over the last few days, the volunteers have drawn on their experience of working with Carvin in building Katrina Aftermath. That groundbreaking site encouraged people to send in breaking news about Hurricane Katrina, including photos and missing person information.
Al Tompkins: You have worked nearly around the clock all weekend on the site. Why is it so important?
Andy Carvin: It's so easy to forget that there are large numbers of people on the Internet with certain types of expertise that can prove to be invaluable in times of crisis. When you think of typical volunteers in an emergency, it's often people with EMS backgrounds, Red Cross volunteers and the like, but not people with technology skills. Yet many Internet-savvy people can bring things to the table, pulling together an amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis. So I'm working with an incredible group of these online volunteers to do just that.
Your hurricane page has drawn hundreds of volunteers. What is it that you are doing that news sites are not?
Carvin: Actually, a lot of what we're doing is related to what news orgs are doing. For example, some of the earliest people I saw get on board were staff at Mississippi Public Broadcasting, who immediately began to send out local emergency alerts via Twitter. And the very first person who offered to help was John Tynan, a Web developer at KJZZ Public Radio in Phoenix. So there are definitely volunteers who are coming at this from a journalism perspective.
One challenge that news orgs often face is the ability to mobilize lots of volunteers. Even if you have a huge online development team, it can be a challenge to roll out every online service you'd like to do during an emergency. With this volunteer effort, people are coming out of the woodwork to drop everything and work on hurricane-related mashups, collect information for our wiki, develop text-messaging interfaces, etc.
Meanwhile, a lot of news sites aren't really designed for heavy public input. They may invite users to post comments, upload photos, etc, but often not much more than that. By utilizing free tools for building wikis, social networking interfaces, Twitter feeds, Google Maps, etc, we're able to mobilize folks to complete very detailed work and collaborate as equals. Over time, though, I'm hoping to see more of this happen within news sites. At NPR.org, for example, we're planning to deploy social networking tools later this fall, specifically to start building relationships with users as partners in editorial projects. So in the future, I'm hoping we'll have both the tools and the human network in place to develop these projects more directly with NPR journalists.
Your team has built a Facebook page that includes a message center. How does that work?
Carvin: Actually, the Facebook page was set up by one of our volunteers mainly as gateway to direct people to our main collaboration site, a social network located at http://gustav08.ning.com. Other Facebook groups have also popped up all over the place, and we're trying to reach out to them to make sure we're not canceling out each other's work. That's often a problem in these situations. During Katrina, for example, lots of different websites started collecting info on missing persons, but not in a coordinated fashion, so the data was really inconsistent. We eventually had to pull together a team of volunteers to sort through all the data sets and create an exchange format that would make it more useful to the Red Cross and other relief agencies. It also happens on a smaller scale - people creating competing Google Maps, for example. So much of my time has been spent just getting different independent teams of volunteers talking with each other so they can collaborate and avoid reinventing the wheel.
What is the value of a hurricane wiki?
Carvin: The wiki is intended as a reference guide to news sources, emergency services, charities and the like. There's very little editorial content there - the go is to help people find useful sources of information and send them on their way. We're still building out the wiki, though, I'm hoping that as many people are coming to contribute to the wiki as there are to browse it, so we can have it fully ready before the storm comes ashore.
The real action, though, is taking place on our social network, http://gustav08.ning.com. We have around 500 people participating there, many of whom are using the social network to direct individual projects, like the Google Map, divvying out wiki assignments, aggregating user-generated content, etc. The social network's homepage is also intended as a more dynamic version of the wiki, displaying the latest photos, alerts, news stories, tweets, Utterz audio messages, etc., in real time.
How important has Twitter been to your team?
Carvin: Twitter allowed us to launch and mobilize faster than ever before. During the tsunami and Katrina, much of what we did to pull together was word-of-mouth through email lists and blogs. With Twitter, I was able to get things started by simply telling my Twitter followers I wanted to pull together and needed volunteers. Immediately I saw my tweets being forwarded from one Twitter user to another. And some of these folks forwarding my tweets have tens of thousands of subscribers, so word spread really fast. In the two days since I started, I've used Twitter to send out more alerts, request volunteers with specific skill sets, announce new tools we've rolled out, etc. We also launched @GustavAlerts, a Twitter account that forwards National Hurricane Center alerts, and are trying to do the same for news stories and blog posts related to Gustav. In a sense, you can break it down this way: the social network is our operations center and live broadcast, the wiki is our reference desk and Twitter is our news wire service.
What could traditional news sites learn from you?
Carvin: The biggest challenge, I think, is breaking down the walls between journalists and the people formerly known as the audience. If you treat them as an audience - treat them passively - don't expect to get much more from them than letters to the editor. But the public can act as your bookers, your fixers, your librarians, your engineers and even your producers if you can give them a vision of what you want to accomplish together and the space they need to go do it. It's also important to not fear sending people away from your own website when necessary. Even as NPR builds up its internal social networking infrastructure, for example, we still plan to continue reaching out communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc, because that's where those communities spend most of their time and are comfortable working with each other. They have unique infrastructures and dynamics that could never be fully replicated within a news org, so you need to be prepared to be working across multiple networks and connect the dots. And when a story breaks quickly and you need help, you need to act quickly, too. Use whatever tools are available to get the public involved helping you pull it all together.
What do you wish you could do but don't have the resources/volunteers/technology to do right now?
Carvin: Right now we mostly need more people - more people to research and produce different sections of the wiki, in particular. For a while we were short on Google Maps experts, but we've reached out to Google and they've helped connect us with more experts. The thing that's still missing, though, is the perfect interface for coordinating all of this activity. For 9/11, we used listservs; for tsunami, it was blogs and aggregators, and then for Katrina, there was all of that, plus wikis and a lot of user-generated content. Now we've added social networks and Google Maps to the mix. But we still need a better system for coordination, so people don't duplicate efforts, or worse, cancel each other out. Frankly, the tools may be just fine, but it's our method of interaction that needs improvement. For one thing, I'm already regretting not having a more disciplined system for passing off assignments to keep things rolling 24/7, and we could have done a better job at organizing assignment boards and identifying team members. Other things I wish we could have done more easily were SMS relays so people could send and receive text messages without having to rely on Twitter, since not everyone has Internet access and Twitter limits the numbers of texts in a given week. Better SMS relay networks is something we've talked about since the tsunami but still haven't mastered yet. And that's just off the top of my head - I'm sure my volunteers could add hundreds of other things to the list. :-)
What happens to the site once the storm passes?
Carvin:After the Tsunami and Katrina, we kept the projects rolling for a while as long as there was news to share, particularly in terms of charitable opportunities. And given the fact that Hannah is heading to the East Coast, it's quite possible we'll have to switch gears to that storm. But once everything quiets down, I'd love to see someone come in independently and analyze everything we did, and help create a template for us to make it easier to mobilize the next time around. I'm very fortunate to have volunteer veterans from previous disasters taking the lead on this project, and it gets a little easier each time. But the tools keep evolving, too, so we need to be nimble enough to integrate the next Twitter, Qik or Ning that comes around during the next disaster. But there's a lot of work to be done to have better systems in place that make it easier for everyone to mobilize at the drop of a hat and coordinate with news orgs and emergency services agencies. No one ever said this would be easy. :-)
More from Andy Carvin: In 2008, he helped launched Get My Vote (), which Carvin says, "invites the public to create audio, video or text political commentaries about what motivates them to support specific candidates." Read his personal Web site here. This is PBS' Learning Now site, which "is a weblog that explores how new technology and Internet culture affect how educators teach and children learn."
September 2, 2008
NPR's Andy Carvin on the Role of Social Media in Gustav Coverage
Al Tompkins
Andy Carvin's job, as the senior strategist for social media at NPR, is to build bridges between NPR and its fans and social network users on places like Twitter and Facebook. Carvin once defined "a truly great blog" as a place where a community forms, and where members find themselves almost compelled to join the conversation.
NPR's Andy Carvin
For Hurricane Gustav, he has led 500 volunteers putting together the Gustav Information Center, which includes a Wiki and a site called "Voices of Gustav." The Voices site is set up to accept calls from people who have been displaced, with the idea that volunteers would transcribe the calls and post them online in a searchable format. That effort tapped into the Utterz Web site. The effort includes three Twitter feeds including GustavAlerts, which is a breaking weather feed. GustavNews follows news stories and GustavBlogs focuses on how blogs are reporting the storm. Another another team of 50 or so volunteers is working on transcribing reports from ham radio operators and other radio scans.
You will notice, by the way, that nowhere on the Gustav Information Center do you find an NPR logo, a link to NPR or any mention of NPR at all. It is a product by the people and for the people.
Carvin tells me that he thinks of Twitter as a citizen generated wire service while the wiki is more like a reference desk.
Several times over the last few days, the volunteers have drawn on their experience of working with Carvin in building Katrina Aftermath. That groundbreaking site encouraged people to send in breaking news about Hurricane Katrina, including photos and missing person information.
Al Tompkins: You have worked nearly around the clock all weekend on the site. Why is it so important?
Andy Carvin: It's so easy to forget that there are large numbers of people on the Internet with certain types of expertise that can prove to be invaluable in times of crisis. When you think of typical volunteers in an emergency, it's often people with EMS backgrounds, Red Cross volunteers and the like, but not people with technology skills. Yet many Internet-savvy people can bring things to the table, pulling together an amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis. So I'm working with an incredible group of these online volunteers to do just that.
Your hurricane page has drawn hundreds of volunteers. What is it that you are doing that news sites are not?
Carvin: Actually, a lot of what we're doing is related to what news orgs are doing. For example, some of the earliest people I saw get on board were staff at Mississippi Public Broadcasting, who immediately began to send out local emergency alerts via Twitter. And the very first person who offered to help was John Tynan, a Web developer at KJZZ Public Radio in Phoenix. So there are definitely volunteers who are coming at this from a journalism perspective.
One challenge that news orgs often face is the ability to mobilize lots of volunteers. Even if you have a huge online development team, it can be a challenge to roll out every online service you'd like to do during an emergency. With this volunteer effort, people are coming out of the woodwork to drop everything and work on hurricane-related mashups, collect information for our wiki, develop text-messaging interfaces, etc.
Meanwhile, a lot of news sites aren't really designed for heavy public input. They may invite users to post comments, upload photos, etc, but often not much more than that. By utilizing free tools for building wikis, social networking interfaces, Twitter feeds, Google Maps, etc, we're able to mobilize folks to complete very detailed work and collaborate as equals. Over time, though, I'm hoping to see more of this happen within news sites. At NPR.org, for example, we're planning to deploy social networking tools later this fall, specifically to start building relationships with users as partners in editorial projects. So in the future, I'm hoping we'll have both the tools and the human network in place to develop these projects more directly with NPR journalists.
Your team has built a Facebook page that includes a message center. How does that work?
Carvin: Actually, the Facebook page was set up by one of our volunteers mainly as gateway to direct people to our main collaboration site, a social network located at http://gustav08.ning.com. Other Facebook groups have also popped up all over the place, and we're trying to reach out to them to make sure we're not canceling out each other's work. That's often a problem in these situations. During Katrina, for example, lots of different websites started collecting info on missing persons, but not in a coordinated fashion, so the data was really inconsistent. We eventually had to pull together a team of volunteers to sort through all the data sets and create an exchange format that would make it more useful to the Red Cross and other relief agencies. It also happens on a smaller scale - people creating competing Google Maps, for example. So much of my time has been spent just getting different independent teams of volunteers talking with each other so they can collaborate and avoid reinventing the wheel.
What is the value of a hurricane wiki?
Carvin: The wiki is intended as a reference guide to news sources, emergency services, charities and the like. There's very little editorial content there - the go is to help people find useful sources of information and send them on their way. We're still building out the wiki, though, I'm hoping that as many people are coming to contribute to the wiki as there are to browse it, so we can have it fully ready before the storm comes ashore.
The real action, though, is taking place on our social network, http://gustav08.ning.com. We have around 500 people participating there, many of whom are using the social network to direct individual projects, like the Google Map, divvying out wiki assignments, aggregating user-generated content, etc. The social network's homepage is also intended as a more dynamic version of the wiki, displaying the latest photos, alerts, news stories, tweets, Utterz audio messages, etc., in real time.
How important has Twitter been to your team?
Carvin: Twitter allowed us to launch and mobilize faster than ever before. During the tsunami and Katrina, much of what we did to pull together was word-of-mouth through email lists and blogs. With Twitter, I was able to get things started by simply telling my Twitter followers I wanted to pull together and needed volunteers. Immediately I saw my tweets being forwarded from one Twitter user to another. And some of these folks forwarding my tweets have tens of thousands of subscribers, so word spread really fast. In the two days since I started, I've used Twitter to send out more alerts, request volunteers with specific skill sets, announce new tools we've rolled out, etc. We also launched @GustavAlerts, a Twitter account that forwards National Hurricane Center alerts, and are trying to do the same for news stories and blog posts related to Gustav. In a sense, you can break it down this way: the social network is our operations center and live broadcast, the wiki is our reference desk and Twitter is our news wire service.
What could traditional news sites learn from you?
Carvin: The biggest challenge, I think, is breaking down the walls between journalists and the people formerly known as the audience. If you treat them as an audience - treat them passively - don't expect to get much more from them than letters to the editor. But the public can act as your bookers, your fixers, your librarians, your engineers and even your producers if you can give them a vision of what you want to accomplish together and the space they need to go do it. It's also important to not fear sending people away from your own website when necessary. Even as NPR builds up its internal social networking infrastructure, for example, we still plan to continue reaching out communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc, because that's where those communities spend most of their time and are comfortable working with each other. They have unique infrastructures and dynamics that could never be fully replicated within a news org, so you need to be prepared to be working across multiple networks and connect the dots. And when a story breaks quickly and you need help, you need to act quickly, too. Use whatever tools are available to get the public involved helping you pull it all together.
What do you wish you could do but don't have the resources/volunteers/technology to do right now?
Carvin: Right now we mostly need more people - more people to research and produce different sections of the wiki, in particular. For a while we were short on Google Maps experts, but we've reached out to Google and they've helped connect us with more experts. The thing that's still missing, though, is the perfect interface for coordinating all of this activity. For 9/11, we used listservs; for tsunami, it was blogs and aggregators, and then for Katrina, there was all of that, plus wikis and a lot of user-generated content. Now we've added social networks and Google Maps to the mix. But we still need a better system for coordination, so people don't duplicate efforts, or worse, cancel each other out. Frankly, the tools may be just fine, but it's our method of interaction that needs improvement. For one thing, I'm already regretting not having a more disciplined system for passing off assignments to keep things rolling 24/7, and we could have done a better job at organizing assignment boards and identifying team members. Other things I wish we could have done more easily were SMS relays so people could send and receive text messages without having to rely on Twitter, since not everyone has Internet access and Twitter limits the numbers of texts in a given week. Better SMS relay networks is something we've talked about since the tsunami but still haven't mastered yet. And that's just off the top of my head - I'm sure my volunteers could add hundreds of other things to the list. :-)
What happens to the site once the storm passes?
Carvin:After the Tsunami and Katrina, we kept the projects rolling for a while as long as there was news to share, particularly in terms of charitable opportunities. And given the fact that Hannah is heading to the East Coast, it's quite possible we'll have to switch gears to that storm. But once everything quiets down, I'd love to see someone come in independently and analyze everything we did, and help create a template for us to make it easier to mobilize the next time around. I'm very fortunate to have volunteer veterans from previous disasters taking the lead on this project, and it gets a little easier each time. But the tools keep evolving, too, so we need to be nimble enough to integrate the next Twitter, Qik or Ning that comes around during the next disaster. But there's a lot of work to be done to have better systems in place that make it easier for everyone to mobilize at the drop of a hat and coordinate with news orgs and emergency services agencies. No one ever said this would be easy. :-)
More from Andy Carvin: In 2008, he helped launched Get My Vote (), which Carvin says, "invites the public to create audio, video or text political commentaries about what motivates them to support specific candidates." Read his personal Web site here. This is PBS' Learning Now site, which "is a weblog that explores how new technology and Internet culture affect how educators teach and children learn."
Friday, August 29, 2008
Is "9-1-1" call taking? Or a response system?
A recent exchange on the 9-1-1 list serv was interesting. Some were complaining that the public and press were blaming 9-1-1 organizations for failures in other parts of the emergency response chain. They argued that people should understand that 9-1-1 simply answers the public's calls and connects with the right response agency (police, fire or EMS) -- the actions of which are beyond the control of the 9-1-1 center.
Others noted repeated instances (also my personal experience) when members of the public thought that 9-1-1 was the whole response system. In fact, the public thinks "9-1-1" is the full emergency response system -- functioning as an integrated whole to respond to their emergencies.
I think the public is right (to want it to be that way) -- and far ahead of most in the emergency response organizations in thinking about emergency services in a modern way. When they call 9-1-1, the public is expecting an end to end service, not a set of stovepipes that talk to each other.
We in emergency response don't tend to think of ourselves as a unified whole -- but instead as a set of distinct stovepipes: 9-1-1, EMS, fire, police, emergency rooms, public health, emergency managers, traffic managers, hospitals, trauma centers, doctors offices, urgent care, mental health, poison control. As a result, we have systems that can't communicate, we incur significant expenses in duplicative systems and processes, we can't measure end to end outcomes. We optimize within each stove pipe, which is exactly the wrong way to optimize end to end.
It doesn't help a heart attack victim to have 9-1-1 and EMS do their jobs perfectly, and then sit in an ED repeating all the same information and waiting for a doctor to process them on (instead of skipping the ED entirely and going directly to the cath lab, saving 30 minutes, as they are doing in Seattle now because of integrated information systems).
David Aylward
Our balkanized organization is a result of history, and it has worked pretty well, but that doesn't mean we should not listen to the public and change how we think about, plan and deliver emergency service for the future.
Others noted repeated instances (also my personal experience) when members of the public thought that 9-1-1 was the whole response system. In fact, the public thinks "9-1-1" is the full emergency response system -- functioning as an integrated whole to respond to their emergencies.
I think the public is right (to want it to be that way) -- and far ahead of most in the emergency response organizations in thinking about emergency services in a modern way. When they call 9-1-1, the public is expecting an end to end service, not a set of stovepipes that talk to each other.
We in emergency response don't tend to think of ourselves as a unified whole -- but instead as a set of distinct stovepipes: 9-1-1, EMS, fire, police, emergency rooms, public health, emergency managers, traffic managers, hospitals, trauma centers, doctors offices, urgent care, mental health, poison control. As a result, we have systems that can't communicate, we incur significant expenses in duplicative systems and processes, we can't measure end to end outcomes. We optimize within each stove pipe, which is exactly the wrong way to optimize end to end.
It doesn't help a heart attack victim to have 9-1-1 and EMS do their jobs perfectly, and then sit in an ED repeating all the same information and waiting for a doctor to process them on (instead of skipping the ED entirely and going directly to the cath lab, saving 30 minutes, as they are doing in Seattle now because of integrated information systems).
David Aylward
Our balkanized organization is a result of history, and it has worked pretty well, but that doesn't mean we should not listen to the public and change how we think about, plan and deliver emergency service for the future.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Thoughts on the D Block/Public Safety Broadband Network Auction: Policy Right; Business Wrong
By David Aylward, COMCARE Director
It is really a shame the FCC’s D Block/Public Safety auction didn’t work. But even in the failure, we should be delighted at the enormous policy progress it represents. Let’s hope the parties involved get the business side correct on the second round.
I taught a law school seminar recently, using this issue as an example of how change in communications policy occurs. My focus was on the extraordinary revolution in spectrum policy and emergency communications that Morgan O’Brien has brought about with his Cyren Call plan. I told the students Marx would be disappointed because change here was so clearly the work of a handful of individuals, not inexorable economic forces. When law enforcement leader Harlin McEwen recruited safety leaders to support O’Brien’s plan, the FCC adopted and applied many of its key principles to the pre-existing spectrum allocation. In doing so, the Commission basically followed the subsequent plan proposed and lobbied hard by Reed Hundt’s now-defunct Frontline. (There in two sentences is a year’s worth of intensive lobbying by scores of parties!) Morgan and Harlin touched off tectonic shifts in spectrum licensing policy and emergency communications architecture, and the FCC sought to implement them.
In a single year there was a huge policy break made from our emergency agencies’ current balkanized, compartmentalized and non-standardized communications to a modern, national Internet Protocol-based approach. From local everything, look at what happened. Thanks to these folks’ leadership, we have gone from local to national license, from local to national network, from self-owned to managed services, from narrow (and “wideband”) to IP broadband, from siloed access control and identity management to shared core services, from separate systems to sharing commercial spectrum and networks, and from separate technology to sharing in the benefits of commercial R&D. These are all extraordinary and positive developments, whatever happens next in the auction, and will help move emergency communications into the 21st century.
Where this approach is running into trouble is in the business issues of who does what (network details, service offerings) and who gets to make money – the issues at which regulatory lawyers in and out of government are generally awful. The key to this and any successful public/private deal is a marketplace test: can you finance it, and then make the numbers work over time? Notwithstanding its brilliance and innovation in inception, and an enormous amount of work in good faith by many parties in a short period of time, this plan didn’t even get out of the starting gate. It is a total failure on a business basis. Not even close.
The market enthusiastically embraced the other, adjoining beachfront spectrum and threw billions of dollars at it, substantially more than expected. But this adjoining spectrum was spurned, even with a floor price much, much lower than a comparable amount of spectrum (which lacked the advantage of access to the additional public safety spectrum and safety customers). How did the balance here between public and private interests get miscalculated so badly?
First, let’s not blame the entrepreneur who got this ball rolling. Morgan O’Brien never made any secret of his desire to run the public safety network as a business (versus acting as some sort of expert consultant to safety leaders). Congress would not change the auction rules as he proposed and hand over a larger block of 700 MHz spectrum in the form of a public safety license. At that point, he could have tried to bid on the D block in competition with Frontline and others, but his much smarter approach was to get the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST) to become (or hire) a network operator – and to quickly give him that role.
Folks are focused on the $500 million payment from D Block bidders that Morgan allegedly asked for. To me that is frosting, and it creates an aura of back room deals when the important issues here were and are not hidden at all. The key document in this grand plan of a private sector/public safety broadband network is the Bidder Information Document (BID) for D Block bidders prepared by Cyren Call on behalf of PSST that was made public last November and is on PSST’s website (and includes at least one clear reference to the successful bidder paying up front for access to the safety spectrum). BID told potential D Block bidders what they would need to know and do to meet the Commission’s public safety obligation for the winning bidder. I encourage you to take 30 minutes and read it. What it describes is about as good as it could be from two perspectives: (1) the power of the PSST to have built and supervise a new, very high quality broadband network for public safety according to its desires and design, and (2) the ability of Cyren Call to run a very serious, large national business on behalf of all public safety clients -- effectively an MVNO for safety, but with some real power over the underlying provider. The architecture diagrams and explanations contained in this document describe in detail the extensive network operations and services by Cyren Call, including services and billing. This BID document says PSST/Cyren Call will “own the customer”. In looking at the income side of the ledger, therefore, a bidder would see Cyren Call/PSST taking the public safety business and paying some level of wholesale rate to the underlying carrier.
Getting to design a network that meets their needs, without serious regard at this point to cost, is attractive to emergency responders. The bidding document describes requirements that are often substantially better than many if not most public safety networks and certainly better than most commercial networks today, e.g. build-out requirements, encryption, back-up power and geographic/in-building coverage. Just look at the huge fight over power back up requirements the FCC is now trying to impose on the wireless industry. The bidding document insists on a strong (and thus expensive) solution there, as it does in just about every area.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Indeed, from the perspective of the emergency responder interests, there is a lot to be said for it, although our experience (and the public’s) with single providers hasn’t always been a happy one.
But power over network design and operations is just one value, one part of the overall equation, for emergency agency constituents/consumers. They will be paying customers of this network if and when it gets built. So they have two very different other interests than power/authority: the first is getting someone to build it (i.e. getting a successful D Block winner that builds out the new broadband network fast), and then being able to buy service on the network at reasonable prices. For these purposes, public safety users’ interests ultimately may be quite different than the way they are being defined today in the start up, design process.
For those who care about this issue it is worth rapidly perusing the formal document circulated by the PSST to potential bidders for the D Block spectrum in November, before the current spectrum auction started. It describes in great detail what the commercial winner of the D Block auction would need to do with the adjoining public safety spectrum, and the relationship it would have with the PSST. As you read it, put yourself in the role of an investment bank deciding whether to finance Frontline, or Warren Buffett spending his own money. http://www.psst.org/documents/BID2_0.pdf
It’s a bit too easy to criticize public safety leaders for designing a “platinum network”. What do we expect them to do? Negotiate with themselves? After all, folks in our world are focused on safety, not business and finance. How could a first set of requirements developed by and for national safety leaders be anything other than an ideal network? (Although it is worth noting that they entirely missed the value of using the backbone network these wireless services will need for the inter-organizational emergency backbone many of us have been advocating as well). And why should they not support the expansive role Morgan wanted for Cyren Call? His hard work got them to the table in the first place. The problem here appears that there was no serious counterweight representing the other half of the partnership (those with experience and interest in building large wireless networks), and the FCC apparently made no effective effort to solve that problem before the auction.
The winner of the D Block auction would have to compete with commercial companies who won other parts of the spectrum, and incumbents with current spectrum. Presumably s/he would compensate for the increased expenses of the network to meet special public safety needs by charging them more, and by offering specialized applications (e.g. radio over internet protocol interoperability services) to them. Certainly, there should also be some attractiveness in the large, stable, recession-proof audience of public safety clients. But it looks like much of the upside was going to Cyren Call/PSST, while the costs of delivering the underlying network were clearly both high and highly uncertain for potential D Block bidders.
One could say, “Well, that was all negotiable after the auction”, but no one in their right mind can bid into that uncertainty at every level, even in the best of credit conditions, particularly with a very large auction down payment at risk if the FCC later decided the winner had not bargained in “good faith”.
I have raised money for start up communications companies, of my own and of others. Reading this Bidder Information Document, it is inconceivable to me how anyone could either bid, or raise the money to bid. But don’t fault Morgan O’Brien for trying to maximize the business he would get to run. Let’s thank him for starting a revolution, significantly advancing how regulators and traditional public safety groups think about meeting safety communications needs. And don’t blame Harlin McEwen for rushing to hire his ally and trying to design the best possible network for safety uses. The question is where was the FCC in supervising this to find the balance needed to make a public/private deal financeable, and viable long term?
Let’s hope the participants get it right the second time around.
David Aylward is a founder and Director of COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance (www.comcare.org), President of National Strategies, Inc., and former Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the US House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance. He also serves as a Director of the E9-1-1 Institute and is Vice Chair of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium’s Technical Committee on Net Enabled Emergency Response. The thoughts expressed here are his own.
It is really a shame the FCC’s D Block/Public Safety auction didn’t work. But even in the failure, we should be delighted at the enormous policy progress it represents. Let’s hope the parties involved get the business side correct on the second round.
I taught a law school seminar recently, using this issue as an example of how change in communications policy occurs. My focus was on the extraordinary revolution in spectrum policy and emergency communications that Morgan O’Brien has brought about with his Cyren Call plan. I told the students Marx would be disappointed because change here was so clearly the work of a handful of individuals, not inexorable economic forces. When law enforcement leader Harlin McEwen recruited safety leaders to support O’Brien’s plan, the FCC adopted and applied many of its key principles to the pre-existing spectrum allocation. In doing so, the Commission basically followed the subsequent plan proposed and lobbied hard by Reed Hundt’s now-defunct Frontline. (There in two sentences is a year’s worth of intensive lobbying by scores of parties!) Morgan and Harlin touched off tectonic shifts in spectrum licensing policy and emergency communications architecture, and the FCC sought to implement them.
In a single year there was a huge policy break made from our emergency agencies’ current balkanized, compartmentalized and non-standardized communications to a modern, national Internet Protocol-based approach. From local everything, look at what happened. Thanks to these folks’ leadership, we have gone from local to national license, from local to national network, from self-owned to managed services, from narrow (and “wideband”) to IP broadband, from siloed access control and identity management to shared core services, from separate systems to sharing commercial spectrum and networks, and from separate technology to sharing in the benefits of commercial R&D. These are all extraordinary and positive developments, whatever happens next in the auction, and will help move emergency communications into the 21st century.
Where this approach is running into trouble is in the business issues of who does what (network details, service offerings) and who gets to make money – the issues at which regulatory lawyers in and out of government are generally awful. The key to this and any successful public/private deal is a marketplace test: can you finance it, and then make the numbers work over time? Notwithstanding its brilliance and innovation in inception, and an enormous amount of work in good faith by many parties in a short period of time, this plan didn’t even get out of the starting gate. It is a total failure on a business basis. Not even close.
The market enthusiastically embraced the other, adjoining beachfront spectrum and threw billions of dollars at it, substantially more than expected. But this adjoining spectrum was spurned, even with a floor price much, much lower than a comparable amount of spectrum (which lacked the advantage of access to the additional public safety spectrum and safety customers). How did the balance here between public and private interests get miscalculated so badly?
First, let’s not blame the entrepreneur who got this ball rolling. Morgan O’Brien never made any secret of his desire to run the public safety network as a business (versus acting as some sort of expert consultant to safety leaders). Congress would not change the auction rules as he proposed and hand over a larger block of 700 MHz spectrum in the form of a public safety license. At that point, he could have tried to bid on the D block in competition with Frontline and others, but his much smarter approach was to get the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST) to become (or hire) a network operator – and to quickly give him that role.
Folks are focused on the $500 million payment from D Block bidders that Morgan allegedly asked for. To me that is frosting, and it creates an aura of back room deals when the important issues here were and are not hidden at all. The key document in this grand plan of a private sector/public safety broadband network is the Bidder Information Document (BID) for D Block bidders prepared by Cyren Call on behalf of PSST that was made public last November and is on PSST’s website (and includes at least one clear reference to the successful bidder paying up front for access to the safety spectrum). BID told potential D Block bidders what they would need to know and do to meet the Commission’s public safety obligation for the winning bidder. I encourage you to take 30 minutes and read it. What it describes is about as good as it could be from two perspectives: (1) the power of the PSST to have built and supervise a new, very high quality broadband network for public safety according to its desires and design, and (2) the ability of Cyren Call to run a very serious, large national business on behalf of all public safety clients -- effectively an MVNO for safety, but with some real power over the underlying provider. The architecture diagrams and explanations contained in this document describe in detail the extensive network operations and services by Cyren Call, including services and billing. This BID document says PSST/Cyren Call will “own the customer”. In looking at the income side of the ledger, therefore, a bidder would see Cyren Call/PSST taking the public safety business and paying some level of wholesale rate to the underlying carrier.
Getting to design a network that meets their needs, without serious regard at this point to cost, is attractive to emergency responders. The bidding document describes requirements that are often substantially better than many if not most public safety networks and certainly better than most commercial networks today, e.g. build-out requirements, encryption, back-up power and geographic/in-building coverage. Just look at the huge fight over power back up requirements the FCC is now trying to impose on the wireless industry. The bidding document insists on a strong (and thus expensive) solution there, as it does in just about every area.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Indeed, from the perspective of the emergency responder interests, there is a lot to be said for it, although our experience (and the public’s) with single providers hasn’t always been a happy one.
But power over network design and operations is just one value, one part of the overall equation, for emergency agency constituents/consumers. They will be paying customers of this network if and when it gets built. So they have two very different other interests than power/authority: the first is getting someone to build it (i.e. getting a successful D Block winner that builds out the new broadband network fast), and then being able to buy service on the network at reasonable prices. For these purposes, public safety users’ interests ultimately may be quite different than the way they are being defined today in the start up, design process.
For those who care about this issue it is worth rapidly perusing the formal document circulated by the PSST to potential bidders for the D Block spectrum in November, before the current spectrum auction started. It describes in great detail what the commercial winner of the D Block auction would need to do with the adjoining public safety spectrum, and the relationship it would have with the PSST. As you read it, put yourself in the role of an investment bank deciding whether to finance Frontline, or Warren Buffett spending his own money. http://www.psst.org/documents/BID2_0.pdf
It’s a bit too easy to criticize public safety leaders for designing a “platinum network”. What do we expect them to do? Negotiate with themselves? After all, folks in our world are focused on safety, not business and finance. How could a first set of requirements developed by and for national safety leaders be anything other than an ideal network? (Although it is worth noting that they entirely missed the value of using the backbone network these wireless services will need for the inter-organizational emergency backbone many of us have been advocating as well). And why should they not support the expansive role Morgan wanted for Cyren Call? His hard work got them to the table in the first place. The problem here appears that there was no serious counterweight representing the other half of the partnership (those with experience and interest in building large wireless networks), and the FCC apparently made no effective effort to solve that problem before the auction.
The winner of the D Block auction would have to compete with commercial companies who won other parts of the spectrum, and incumbents with current spectrum. Presumably s/he would compensate for the increased expenses of the network to meet special public safety needs by charging them more, and by offering specialized applications (e.g. radio over internet protocol interoperability services) to them. Certainly, there should also be some attractiveness in the large, stable, recession-proof audience of public safety clients. But it looks like much of the upside was going to Cyren Call/PSST, while the costs of delivering the underlying network were clearly both high and highly uncertain for potential D Block bidders.
One could say, “Well, that was all negotiable after the auction”, but no one in their right mind can bid into that uncertainty at every level, even in the best of credit conditions, particularly with a very large auction down payment at risk if the FCC later decided the winner had not bargained in “good faith”.
I have raised money for start up communications companies, of my own and of others. Reading this Bidder Information Document, it is inconceivable to me how anyone could either bid, or raise the money to bid. But don’t fault Morgan O’Brien for trying to maximize the business he would get to run. Let’s thank him for starting a revolution, significantly advancing how regulators and traditional public safety groups think about meeting safety communications needs. And don’t blame Harlin McEwen for rushing to hire his ally and trying to design the best possible network for safety uses. The question is where was the FCC in supervising this to find the balance needed to make a public/private deal financeable, and viable long term?
Let’s hope the participants get it right the second time around.
David Aylward is a founder and Director of COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance (www.comcare.org), President of National Strategies, Inc., and former Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the US House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance. He also serves as a Director of the E9-1-1 Institute and is Vice Chair of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium’s Technical Committee on Net Enabled Emergency Response. The thoughts expressed here are his own.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Informed Emergency Response
At COMCARE, we talk a lot about informed emergency response. We'd like to know, what does informed emergency response mean to you?
Introduction
To be effective, responders and others involved in emergency response efforts need easy, rapid access to essential data, and to be able to share it. That means implementing an approach that crosses domains, allowing responders to access the information they need when they need it, whether the emergency is a day to day or mass casualty incident.
To make this happen, the emergency services “virtual enterprise” needs to transform itself from the current stove pipe environment to a flexible, dynamic, all hazards, all domains environment before another major disaster occurs. We understand that for change to happen, all participants in this enterprise need to engage in an active dialogue about what should be done, what cannot be done, and how we can collectively achieve these goals.
We invite you to join or even start the discussion. The intended audience for this blog is anyone involved in emergency response whether from the public, NGO or private sectors. Practitioners can include representatives from fire services, 9-1-1, emergency dispatch, law enforcement, emergency medical services, emergency management, public health, healthcare and others. In addition, representatives in the information technology, communications, public policy, and military arenas as well as those from the private sector who either develop technical solutions for the emergency services enterprise or have an interest in the transformation of emergency response processes.
If you are interested in starting a discussion on a particular topic or article you have encountered, please send a note to Eileen Groell at mailto:egroell@comcare.org and she will post it. We look forward to the dialogue ahead!
To make this happen, the emergency services “virtual enterprise” needs to transform itself from the current stove pipe environment to a flexible, dynamic, all hazards, all domains environment before another major disaster occurs. We understand that for change to happen, all participants in this enterprise need to engage in an active dialogue about what should be done, what cannot be done, and how we can collectively achieve these goals.
We invite you to join or even start the discussion. The intended audience for this blog is anyone involved in emergency response whether from the public, NGO or private sectors. Practitioners can include representatives from fire services, 9-1-1, emergency dispatch, law enforcement, emergency medical services, emergency management, public health, healthcare and others. In addition, representatives in the information technology, communications, public policy, and military arenas as well as those from the private sector who either develop technical solutions for the emergency services enterprise or have an interest in the transformation of emergency response processes.
If you are interested in starting a discussion on a particular topic or article you have encountered, please send a note to Eileen Groell at mailto:egroell@comcare.org and she will post it. We look forward to the dialogue ahead!
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