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FDNY to Modernize Dispatch System After Leaving Tech Partner

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The City’s Fire Department insists that fixing Hexagon’s system would have taken almost as long, and that Hexagon wanted an additional $19 million to resolve the program’s issues.

The Fire Department of the City of New York has abandoned its tech partner Intergraph, after two years of their quest to modernize its 1970 dispatch system. In February 2015, the FDNY selected Intergraph, a division of Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure to update its incident response technologies. A few months ago, Intergraph delivered the new dispatch system. The FDNY, however, has found the software insufficiently customized for its extremely particular logistic needs, as reported by Crain’s New York. 

In testing, the FDNY found that the system didn’t always assign the correct units to fires and emergency calls. The FDNY now wants to take matters into its own hands, and use their own programming team and operations experts, assisted by outside consultants and programmers to create a custom product suited to its complex firefighting needs. “The bottom line is that the [Hexagon] product is not meeting our mission-critical needs for dispatching and managing fire operations,” a Fire Department spokesman said. “We’re going to customize a product of our own, utilizing our programming resources and our own people.”

The in-house project is anticipated to take another three years and an estimated additional $30 million to complete. The City’s Fire Department insists that fixing Hexagon’s system would have taken almost as long, and that Hexagon wanted an additional $19 million to resolve the program’s issues. A $2.03 billion budget has already been appropriated for the project. So far, the FDNY has spent $10.7 million on the project, $3.6 million of which the city has been billed for.

FDNY is the largest municipal fire department in the United States, and second in the world after the Tokyo Fire Department. It is known as the world’s busiest and most highly skilled emergency response agency, providing services to more than eight million residents in the five boroughs of New York. The department has almost 10,500 fire personnel and more than 500 Fire units. 

Founded in 1969, Intergraph, based in Huntsville, Ala., provides software to over 2,500 public safety and security agencies around the world. It has also delivered a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system for NY’s Emergency Medical Service, which is still being tested. Hexagon is traded on the Nasdaq, and employs more than 16,000 employees in 46 countries with net sales of about $3.4 billion, as per the company’s website.

Some government officials are skeptical of the FDNY’s ability to manage the job on its own. The FDNY spokesman responded, “We have subject-matter experts—the dispatchers who do the work and [who] will pair up side by side with programmers. We have our legacy system, Starfire, as a starting point. And we’ve learned a great deal. We know what we’re looking for, what to avoid and what the obstacles might be.”

By: Ilana Siyance

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