Raising The Degrees of 'Interoperable'

A new survey just released by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) SAFECOM Program claims that more than two-thirds of emergency response agencies across the nation now use interoperable communications "at varying levels."

The claim gives rise to hope and concern. The great unasked and unanswered question is: On how many levels are agencies communicating?

The survey, officially known as the National Interoperability Baseline Survey, polled 22,400 randomly selected law enforcement, fire response and EMS agencies at state and local levels, as part of SAFECOM's on-going efforts to determine and encourage the development of interoperable communications.

The pollsters got over 6,800 responses, nearly evenly split between law enforcement and first response, and EMS.

The resulting survey gives DHS planners their first ever snapshot of how far along federal state and local first responders have come to achieve true interoperability. More important, it lets DHS know how far they still must go in order to meet that goal.

Anyone familiar with the debacle after 9-11 knows that failure to communicate costs countless lives. No surprise, then, that DHS has been anxious to develop national standards to encourage the development of capabilities for all emergency responders to effectively communicate.

The fact that a majority of the agencies that responded did so positively was cause for some celebration. "The survey reinforces the fact that interoperability is achievable," said DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

But DHS has paid a price to make that claim. The agency has distributed over $2.1 billion, in the past five years, to help state and local governments acquire interoperable communications capabilities. And that money hasn't always been sufficient, nor has it gone into the most effective communications systems.

The survey's public announcement that interoperability was in place in most agencies, "at varying levels… to some degree," indicates just how far we still are from a truly effective and universal system

Indeed, some glaring and potentially dangerous weaknesses were revealed in that same Baseline Survey.

For example, while large federal agencies have made great strides, smaller local agencies still lag in getting funding and technical skills needed to launch effective interoperable systems.

It is ironic, because SAFECOM itself is pledged to a "bottom-up" approach, adopted when it was originally established by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2004.

It was a difficult time. The agency emerged in the wake of shocking findings of the National Task Force on Interoperability, which revealed that the agencies most likely to respond to terrorist attack or natural disasters were often saddled with incompatible and aging communications equipment, lacking any standards (and often the funding to go with them) on which to build an effective national grid.

For most of its existence, SAFECOM has pressed forward under one of those uniquely competent civil servants, bearing extensive experience in two separate federal entities, seemingly prepared by design to have prepared him for the challenges of building the communications capabilities of DHS-related agencies.

David G. Boyd, the director of the DHS Office for Interoperability and Compatibility, which now oversees the SAFECOM program, is a skilled administrator who joined DHS in 2003, after a distinguished career in the Army followed by a stint as director of Science and Technology for the National Institute of Justice.

David G. Boyd

His abilities were acknowledged when he was accorded a 2005 Presidential Rank Award, the highest recognition available in the federal civil service.

At the same time, Boyd has acknowledged that his present tasks are probably the most challenging of his career.

His brief is to make sure the nation's 60,000 emergency response agencies can communicate with each other, across departmental and jurisdictional lines.

No doubt with his approval, SAFECOM avoided sugarcoating his and its mission: "The lack of interoperability is a long-standing, complex and costly problem, with many impediments to overcome."

One of the most significant findings of the Baseline Survey was that there continues to be a great need for first responder training and emergency preparedness exercises: "Agencies tend to be more developed in technology and certain governance related interoperability areas than they are in standard operating procedures and exercises."

The report also found that effective cross-discipline and cross-jurisdiction interoperable communications are more frequently found at the local level (perhaps because they are more immediately involved with any disaster in their midst) than between local and state agencies.

But at the same time, at the higher reaches of government, the report noted that the use of large, shared systems has facilitated the development of more complete and systematic interoperable systems.

For both big agencies and small, the Baseline Survey will have long-term impact. It allows SAFECOM to determine the capacity for interoperable communications, establish a process by which such systems should be measured, and provides data for all to use to make better-informed decisions to effectively allocate resources.

Its legacy will be every life saved as a result of the effective nation-wide interoperability standards it promotes.