[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Hi Rex:
I take the note about dearth of support in the
emergency systems, aka, public safety, for standards
to heart. Only your indulgence enables me to
monitor those lists.
My response is slightly different here. As I
said to your team members in DC last year, my
issue is that there isn't enough representation
by major public safety vendors, and I certainly
do include my own company. The problem with
standards here is that the customer is waking
up to the vital interests of standards as a
source of interoperability before the vendors,
so the maturity problem rests with vendors.
Anyone should have understood what 9/11 meant
to this industry but it is a highly fragmented
marketplace both by economic tiers and by
local/state/federal/tribal relationships. In
effect, it isn't really one market and that
has to change by commoditization.
We find ourselves bidding state reports,
local reports, and highly local work processes
with huge RFPs from small and large agencies
that do not reckon with the actual costs of
the systems they are trying to procure. In
fact, aside from hardware, we should be bidding
based on reference IEPs (Information Exchange
Packages) and common web services. An agency
should be able to purchase a dispatch system,
a police, fire or emergency services records
system and a jail and court management system
without obscenely high costs for integration.
We aren't there yet but at the very least,
the vendors are waking up because the RFPs
are starting to ask the right questions. Now
it is a positioning game.
I doubt we are the only business segment with
this problem, but we are the one that has to
solve it right soon, and that means realistic
RFPs for systems that can be upgraded cost
effectively toward eventual NIEMs-based systems.
The fact of the sudden but predictable emergence
of very large sensor arrays into this market
makes it harder. On the other hand, we know how.
len
|
