Security-alarm companies commonly receive an electronic alert from a customer, then make a 911 call to the 911 call center. This may change if the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officers (APCO) approves their draft standard for automatically contacting the 911 center, bypassing the alarm company. My interest is how this proposed standard would affect IPT systems and associated 911/E911 software.The standard proposed is XML based. This would allow automated processing. The automatic notification will probably reduce the information errors from a panicking caller. The original text form of message can also be processed faster.
About 32 million calls generated from alarm companies would now be automatically routed to the 911 center. The value is that the automated routing would reduce the response time by 2 to 3 minutes, by eliminating the intermediate alarm company action. This translates into fewer lives lost, fewer or less severe injuries, less property damage and probably faster apprehension of criminals.
The standard has already been tested in Richmond, VA. Richmond intends to make this standard law for all its 911 centers. The total number of 911 calls would probably not decrease. The efficiency is that the existing call takers at the 911 center would be assisted by the automated alerts, thereby allowing the call takers to respond faster to human generated calls.
If the standard is approved and eventually adopted nationwide, then I think that the existing 911/E911 software in IPT systems will change as well. Existing enterprise alarms could be connected to the IPT system. The legacy PBX may have alarm devices attached, but currently the alarm signal is passed through the PBX, not interpreted. The IPT system software could be enhanced to analyze the emergency and take appropriate action to warn employees at the enterprise site. The IPT system could determine and report the severity of the problem from the alarm sensor information.
A modest addition of artificial intelligence (expert system) can be programmed into the IPT system to better determine the extent of the emergency. The expert system software then could alert employees at their desks through their PCs and/or wired/wireless phones about the emergency and what action to take. I also think that the continuing focus on emergency alert systems at schools and universities would be enhanced by the added IPT intelligence.
With the development of UC capabilities, the UC system could also be used for 911 calls. Presence knowledge would be very useful for delivering alarm messaging to employees via the most appropriate communications media. Presence would also help determine who is on site and who is absent. This could reduce unnecessary searches by the emergency response personnel.
I look forward to the day that messages from Instant Messaging (IM) can be 911 calls. Preprogrammed IMs could be translated by the IPT system into the standardized XML format. IM could also be used, in addition to phone calls and PC screen alerts, to notify employees of the emergency and of who would then take the necessary actions in response. I expect that as UC matures, it will also become part of the 911/E911 services.
