In today’s dynamic technology environment, application integration is imperative to delivering solutions that improve organizational productivity, reduce long-term costs, and provide better ROI. Nowhere is this more true than with public safety and security agencies.
In this podcast, I talk with Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s Senior Enterprise Architect David Goedecke about how EdgeFrontier – our application integration platform – can improve ROI and lower ownership costs on public safety technologies. Enjoy.
Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with David Goedecke who is a senior enterprise architect with Intergraph’s Public Safety and Security division. David is based in our Melbourne, Australia office. David, thank you for joining us.
David: It’s my pleasure.
Laura Beth: David is here to talk about something that everyone wonders, and that’s “how can you increase your return on investment from the public safety solutions you’ve implemented?” David, first tell us about your role at Intergraph SG&I?
David: I’m the senior enterprise architect for our public safety business in Australia and Southeast Asia. I’m responsible for understanding what our customers and prospective customers require from their public safety solution and how it will fit into their business. I then craft a solution, which could comprise Intergraph technology, technology from partner companies and other third parties, and professional services. Sometimes this is to add additional capability to an existing customer, but other times it is for a brand new prospect.
Laura Beth: What do you hear from customers on the return on investment they want from their public safety solutions?
David: That’s a great question. A public safety solution rarely exists in isolation within an organization, and in fact is often embedded deeply within the agency. In the case of computer-aided dispatch, the initial emergency call for service is the first contact that the agency has with a member of the community who needs their assistance, and nearly all activities in that organization follow from that initial call.
What this means is these solutions need to connect to and exchange information with many other systems throughout the enterprise. Not just other public safety systems but also human resources systems, financial systems, workforce and ERP systems, and, even in some cases, inventory and retail point-of-sale systems. Because of this, agencies see a large total cost of ownership, and a need to be responsive to change both within and outside organizations.
Laura Beth: What are some ways customers can increase their return on investment?
David: In IT project management there is always tension. There’s a tension that has to be managed between time, cost, and quality implementing a project. Now a customer can skew this triangle in their favor by doing things like reducing the effort and cost to build and maintain integrations, promoting reusability, and standardizing algorithms and data processing workflows. Overall, this can improve financial performance and organizational responsiveness.
Laura Beth: So let’s talk about EdgeFrontier and bring that into the discussion. What are some of the key features of it?
David: EdgeFrontier is Intergraph’s integration toolkit. It allows systems to be linked together without writing low level code. It allows data to be brought in through many different types of communication methods and protocols, to be filtered, transformed, have customer-defined business rules applied, and then share that data with multiple other systems again through different types of communication methods. It avoids writing code, which is both tedious, and as I well know, time consuming. It’s both flexible and reusable, and consequently very powerful.
Laura Beth: Ok so let’s talk about another product- CAD Connect. How does CAD Connect make processes more efficient?
David: CAD Connect provides a standard set of components for integrating with Intergraph’s computer aided dispatch system through EdgeFrontier. The integration services provide real-time notifications whenever something happens in CAD, for example when a new event is created or a unit is dispatched to an event, but also for injecting commands into CAD, such as a request to create an event by a remote system. These standard components can then be shared by multiple EdgeFrontier systems.
Prior to this, integrations were nearly always point-to-point, which meant that many of the same integration tasks were performed multiple times and there was little capacity to re-use these core components. This tends to add a lot of unnecessary integration complexity and actually increases the total cost of ownership of those integrations over time.
Laura Beth: David you are talking a lot about how these two products are reducing the time that it takes to implement things and also the total cost of ownership which will give you a return on your investment. Can you go over what is the ultimate goal of these two software solutions for public safety agencies?
David: Ultimately the goal is to reduce the effort to build and maintain integrations and hence reduce their costs. Additionally, by reducing integration complexity, agency project managers can focus on managing and realizing the near and the long term benefits of the solution implementation.
Overall, this is how we gain a greater return on the investment from the CAD system.
Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our audience?
David: Yes, there are a couple of additional things. CAD Connect is just one of three standard connectors for building integrations to our public safety solutions with EdgeFrontier – the others are for our law enforcement Records Management System called inPURSUIT and for our security Command Center solutions. More connectors for EdgeFrontier will be coming in the future which promises a rich integration capability for our customers and for our future prospects.
Laura Beth: David, we appreciate your insight. Obviously, this is a hot topic because who doesn’t want a return on their investment? We appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our EdgeFrontier by visiting our website at hexagonsafetyinfrastructure.com/edgefrontier.
