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ESTA’s three emergency communication centres form the gateway to emergency services in Victoria, taking over 1.8 million Triple Zero calls last financial year to dispatch ambulance, police, fire and State Emergency Services to callers in emergency crisis. That equates to an emergency call every 17.5 seconds.

To do this effectively and to help save lives and property, the organisation needs to run like a well-oiled machine, all the time. As such, ESTA is at the forefront of emergency services organizations in terms of embracing and adapting to the best technology available. This includes their Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system which manages the calltaking and dispatch process at the hands of dedicated 24/7 operational staff.

However, like all operational organizations, there is a need for strong support and systems in place for that ‘well-oiled machine’ to run. That is why, ESTA elected to embrace other technologies to ensure it remained the world-class organization that it is. KnowledgeOne is one of those technologies.

ESTA’s ‘support office’ which encompasses all of its finance, administration, human resources, communications, information technology and governance areas is essentially the back-of-house, administration system, responsible for managing and archiving logs, statistics and critical information about each of the call centres. It also caters for the information storage and management of major multi-million dollar contracts with service providers. These include the Mobile Data Network, Emergency Alerting System and Metropolitan Mobile Radio, which are again form part of ESTA’s suite of technology applications.

With such a pivotal role it’s no accident then, that when ESTA were looking for a customisable information management system, they turned to Knowledgeone K1.

According to Sue-Ann Sapurmas, ESTA’s project manager, the need to comply with the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS), was an important part of ESTA’s considerations.

Since June 2006, The Public Records Office Victoria has required that electronic records for long term archiving have VERS certification – VERS is a State Government strategy to standardise electronic archiving. It’s particularly focused on the long term preservation of public records electronically stored off-site.

“ESTA plans to store its archives in the central repository, which will be managed by The Public Records Office Victoria,” Sue-Ann Sapurmas explained.

“Combined with the fact that our previous information management system needed to be upgraded, we took the natural step of incorporating the two requirements from the beginning,” she said.

“We needed to be able to customise the selected information management system to ensure it could become VERS compliant. Using the latest Electronic Document and Records Management technology (EDRM), K1 and ESTA are working together to make this quest for compliance a reality.

“Over the last few months, I have been using the VERS standard to configure Knowledgeone K1 for compliance. With the Knowledgeone training program, customisation of the software is something the Information Management (IM) professional can do easily, without the need to outsource,” Ms Sapurmas said.

One of ESTA’s key objectives was to ensure that they were using the latest technology.

“With the information management system being implemented across the organisation, the customised K1 solution now means, at the completion of the roll-out, all information and records will be residing in the one place,” said Sue-Ann.

Sue-Ann emphasised that this will encourage information sharing, replacing what has traditionally been silos of information, with a large amount of information being emailed backwards and forwards, between the call centres and head office, as it is required.

“This is a system we will be rolling out to service almost 500 people across the organisation. It was important to have live document management to minimise the risk and to invest in technology that we can continue to work with and adapt to suit the ever changing needs of Victoria’s Emergency Services”.

Sue-Ann took part in Knowledgeone Corporation’s training program. She is now working with the ESTA team to on-train each of them to a level of competency with the Knowledgeone K1 system.

Within four months, the K1 pilot solution was configured according to organisational and user specifications with training manuals and training programs designed to meet the needs of the ESTA users.

This small team at ESTA selected to pilot the program, are now working on further enhancements, before rolling the software out to the remaining ESTA sites.

Since implementing the K1 solution, the team has found some obvious benefits – particularly around risk minimisation and data protection.

“Once records are created and captured into K1 they are maintained to ensure they are secure from tampering or inadvertent access while being easily identified, located and retrieved by those permitted to do so,” explained Sue-Ann.

Information security is critical at ESTA. The information security model for K1 was designed for cross-sectional information access to particular document types. As such, the customisation ensures the Information captured in K1 is distinguished by document types in line with the Public Record Office Standard Retention and Disposal Authority records.

By the end of the year ESTA plans to have rolled out Knowledgeone K1 to its three State Emergency Communications Centres located in Burwood, Ballarat and World Trade Centre in Melbourne.

Background on ESTA

The Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) was established as a Statutory Authority on 1 July 2005, under the Emergency Services Telecommunications Act. ESTA is responsible for the management of all emergency call taking and dispatch services for Victoria’s Emergency Services organisations, including: The Country Fire Association (CFA); The Metropolitan Ambulance Services (MAS); the Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services; Victoria Police and the Victoria State Emergency Service (VICSES).

Background on Knowledgeone Corporation

Established in 1985, Australian company Knowledgeone Corporation now has approximately 150,000 users across 10 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, United Kingdom, Canada, East Timor and Zimbabwe. The Knowledgeone product range encompasses a full multi-faceted application for management of information for small to medium organisations, as well as large scale enterprises. It addresses business functions such as workflow, imaging and knowledge management. The range includes a set of niche application products, designed for records management, email management and image management.

For more information on Knowledgeone Corporation please contact + 612 8913 9300 or visit www.knowledgeonecorp.com