Shortly before this year’s International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference, CentralSquare Technologies invited a number of public safety writers to come down to its Lake Mary, FL, headquarters. The company wanted to discuss goals for improving its public safety software.
One of CentralSquare’s most critical goals is to make its public safety products more user-friendly. "We are working to bring consumer grade experiences to public safety," says Steve Seoane, executive vice president and general manager for public safety at CentralSquare.
"Officers are safer if we can get them out of their field software as fast as possible," Seoane adds. He explains that if officers are not looking at their screens, their situational awareness is enhanced. And the public is safer if officers and other public safety professionals can respond more quickly.
CentralSquare is working to produce a variety of public safety solutions that are more efficient than the company's current products. Seoane and other company representatives say the goal is to cut the time from receipt of the 911 call to the first responders arriving on the scene. One of the latest revisions of its software offers a 36% click reduction, allowing users to complete the task in 56% of the time.
Jatin Atre, CentralSquare's chief marketing officer, says that half of the company's 2,000 employees are working on new products or ways to improve existing products. "We are benchmarking every single workflow" with the goal of making it more efficient, he says.
To help achieve that goal, CentralSquare's engineers are riding with first responders and sitting with calltakers and dispatchers. Seoane says this dedication to learning how the customers actually use the product yields results engineers cannot achieve just working at their desks. For example, they discovered that customers were having trouble using the field products in the dark. That's something they wouldn't have realized testing the products in their well-lit offices. Now to simulate what they learned about real-world conditions, they test the field products in the dark.
Improving user experience is just one of the initiatives for CentralSquare's public safety team. Seoane and Atre say the company is investing in five key areas: enhanced user experience, better interoperability, more cloud-based solutions, mobile and app-based solution, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Interoperability is one of the key public safety goals the company is pursuing, and a recent acquisition has made that goal easier to achieve. In May CentralSquare acquired Tellus Safety Solutions LLC, a company that specializes in creating tools for connecting computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems across different jurisdictions.
CentralSquare has a stated goal of creating a nationwide 911 dispatch system. Toward that end, the company is offering complementary access to Tellus for all its clients. Atre says the company is even offering free access to Tellus to agencies that don't use CentralSquare's CAD system but want to establish connection with jurisdictions that are CentralSquare clients. "The goal is to break down silos" for quicker emergency response times, Atre says. "People are increasingly taking us up on it," he adds.
CAD interoperability can speed public safety response. CentralSquare uses the example of a cross-jurisdictional response when police on the border of a jurisdiction are the closest responders to an active shooter attack. CAD interoperability allows dispatch to alert the closest responders and that can save lives. CentralSquare says cutting emergency response times by up to two minutes per incident can save tens of thousands of lives per year. Interoperability is one element of aiding that faster response. Making the CAD tools easier to use is another.
Not only is CentralSquare working to bolster CAD interoperability and to speed first responders to the aid of the public, it has partnered with Genetec to provide public safety responders with better situational awareness.
“As a result of this partnership, when a citizen calls 911, dispatchers will be able to seamlessly see what is happening at the caller’s location, ensure the right type of emergency response is dispatched, improve the situational awareness and safety of the responding officer, and have an integrated video record of the incident for future investigations,” CentralSquare CEO Simon Angove said in a press release. “By seamlessly integrating CentralSquare’s world-class Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) software with Genetec’s ground-breaking, real-time crime center technologies, we are enabling thousands of public safety agencies to speed-up dispatch center operations, shorten emergency response time, and reduce the number of victims of crimes and disasters across North America.”
CentralSquare was created from the merger of Superion, TriTech, Zuercher, and the public sector and healthcare business of Aptean.
