New Zealand Fire Service(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 40

Senior IS executive: Alma Hong, CIO
Reports to: Brett Warwick, CFO
Size of IS shop: 40

PCs: 780
Mobile PCs: 400
Terminals: 716
Hand-held devices: 104
Total screens: 2000

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: Acer; HP; Toshiba; Windows XP, Vista, 7
Server environment: HP; Windows 2003, 2008
DBMS: Oracle, SQL
Address: Level 9, 80 The Terrace, Wellington
Website: www.fire.org.nz
Key IS projects this year: Multi-agency command and control vehicles; Automated location referencing for vehicles; Microsoft SharePoint Intranets; Unified communications; Digital radios implementation; Station management system enhancements; spatial and data model reviews; NZ Police and emergency service joint projects.

Several factors will influence ICT decisions and budgets over the next 12 to 24 months for the New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS). In recognition of the NZFS’s changing role to a broad fire, rescue and emergency management organisation, as well as a new view of operations within a carbon-sensitive regime, there is renewed emphasis on interagency interoperability and partnership. Internally, ICT requires enhanced understanding of, and interaction with, the business and operations of the NZ Fire Service. The business also needs to further understand the role of ICT and empower practitioners appropriately, says CIO Alma Hong.

There are plans in place to strategically and systematically converge, re-model and simplify existing technology platforms, interfaces and data models to a Service Oriented Architecture, while upholding current ICT business-as-usual and resourcing new projects, which will in turn add to the existing environment.Important to ICT development and decisions is the focus on proving competitiveness in the wider market, and clear performance measures continue to be put in place that can be used against industry best practice benchmarks, thereby establishing value for money propositions.

Hong’s team will leverage rapid advancement in technologies, particularly GIS, telecommunications, cloud computing and social networking over the coming months, as well as leveraging and influencing government initiatives including Geospatial Strategy, aggregated procurement and interoperability.

ICT will support and enable major functional areas of the NZ Fire Service, including business excellence, emergency response, communication centres, community risk reduction and the National Rural Fire Authority.