The Grill: John A. Benanti and Donald Stanton

Computerworld - Fire trucks remain the iconic image of any fire department, but firefighters -- like all other workers -- are relying on more technology than that to be effective on the job. Certainly, IT will never replace water hoses when it comes to dousing a blaze, but computers are increasingly being deployed on the scene, too. That's certainly the case at the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), one of the largest fire departments in the world. Here, Deputy Commissioner of Technology and Support Services John A. Benanti and Assistant Commissioner Donald Stanton talk about how technology fits into the operations at FDNY.

Can you give me an overview of the technology FDNY uses? Benanti: There's an awful lot of technology here. We work on mainframe services. We support our CAD dispatch, data warehouses, well over 100 applications, Unix and Linux servers. We now have kiosks in our fire stations and EMS stations for firefighters to go online.

Tell me about the Fire Department Operations Center (FDOC). Stanton: It's built out with IT and radio capabilities. Before 9/11, it was more of a notification center. But right now, we get video feeds into the center. We get helicopter feeds from NYPD. We have agreements with a number of news stations to supply their raw helicopter feeds. We have connections to the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] and high-tech connections to Homeland Security.

Computerworld - Fire trucks remain the iconic image of any fire department, but firefighters -- like all other workers -- are relying on more technology than that to be effective on the job. Certainly, IT will never replace water hoses when it comes to dousing a blaze, but computers are increasingly being deployed on the scene, too. That's certainly the case at the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), one of the largest fire departments in the world. Here, Deputy Commissioner of Technology and Support Services John A. Benanti and Assistant Commissioner Donald Stanton talk about how technology fits into the operations at FDNY.

Can you give me an overview of the technology FDNY uses? Benanti: There's an awful lot of technology here. We work on mainframe services. We support our CAD dispatch, data warehouses, well over 100 applications, Unix and Linux servers. We now have kiosks in our fire stations and EMS stations for firefighters to go online.

Tell me about the Fire Department Operations Center (FDOC). Stanton: It's built out with IT and radio capabilities. Before 9/11, it was more of a notification center. But right now, we get video feeds into the center. We get helicopter feeds from NYPD. We have agreements with a number of news stations to supply their raw helicopter feeds. We have connections to the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] and high-tech connections to Homeland Security.

Benanti: For example, [during the 2009 landing of a jet on the Hudson River], we were able to watch all the feeds and were monitoring operations from the FDOC.

Stanton: We have a lot of different people who could be involved in a rescue operation. We had people on the scene managing the incident, but we were able to, from here, look at the feeds and see how we were picking up people. People here might have been able to see something that you couldn't pick up on the scene. In a mass casualty incident, we now can track patients from the site to when they get to the emergency room.

What are the challenges of developing and deploying software for such a specialized workforce? Stanton: The main thing we want to do is get the end user involved, to make sure we have the requirements properly documented and then do extensive testing to make sure the application is working properly.

Benanti: For the most part, a need will be identified by the uniformed staff. They'll work with the technology people, who are almost all civilians, to best fit the need. We have a project management office that will map out what needs to be done, and we'll look at what technology is out there, and then we kind of match it up.

Tell me about the FDNY Geographic Information Systems Unit. Stanton: GIS is a very important part of our operations. It can give us the locations of various buildings, building plans, locations of hazardous materials, finding various infrastructure, such as fire hydrants. It can check hospital availability.

What about mobile technology? Benanti: We're piloting tablets. We use them with our electronic command board and patient tracking systems. We've got them out to a number of [fire] companies to test them. We're trying to evaluate how they're working.

Stanton: The firefighting environment is not like a standard user. The volume of water and smoke and how it's used, it has to be much more ruggedized, and we have to make sure it stands up before we roll it out.

How are tablets used in the field? Stanton: During the 9/11 incident, fire units were tracked on a manual board, and when the buildings came down, we lost that information. We can use the tablets to electronically track these units, and it's backhauled to the fire operations center.

What other key pieces of technology have you deployed that you consider particularly critical? Benanti: We're updating our field unit building inspections. We never had all our building information in one database, so we created a data warehouse solely for building inspection information. That's now all in that system along with information from other city agencies. In the past, when firefighters have done their inspections, they've been based on a schedule. But what we're getting to is coming up with a code and program to do inspections by risk. The data warehouse can shoot out what the biggest-risk buildings are. The higher-risk buildings will be looked at first. We're piloting this. We also developed an automatic vehicle location system. We put this technology into the [computer-aided dispatch] system, so when [callers] say where they are, there's software in the dispatch system that allows us to find the best route for the right ambulance to get to that location. And we just finished installing kiosks. They're basically PCs in the firehouse, a larger-screen PC. We had PCs for the officers, but now, by putting them in each of the kitchens, firefighters can get on and receive training.

What's the most promising upcoming technology for your field? Benanti: One thing we haven't been able to do is track a firefighter within a building. We have tracking technology but we're not able to track them [vertically]. The Z is the vertical coordinate, and that hasn't been developed yet. Once we get the Z coordinate, that's a huge piece for the fire department.

-- Interview by Computerworld contributing writer Mary K. Pratt (marykpratt@verizon.net).

Read more about Government/Industries in Computerworld's Government/Industries Topic Center.