| Art Botterell |
The Incident Command Network
| Art Botterell has made most of the major mistakes already. He's currently applying what he's learned in San Francisco's "Multimedia Gulch." |
This article can be found on
page 58 of the Mar/Apr 1998
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
Dear Chief:
Remember that Incident Command System intro course you sent us to years ago? Before the instructor got into all the stuff we remember now about Operations, Plans, Logistics and Finance I seem to remember hearing some basic, underlying principles of ICS.
One of them, as I recall, was "common communications." That meant radios, right? Another one was "common vocabulary."
What's that got to do with computers? Everything, Chief. Just everything.
We've had ICS for a quarter of a century now. It's still controversial in some corners and there are some issues still being worked out, but by and large I think we can say it's been an enormously successful standard (what my professors likes to call a "paradigm") for managing public-safety incidents. Of course, some folks argue (and they may be right) that their favored non-ICS approaches work better in certain circumstances. Even so, it seems clear that there's an huge advantage to having a standard system and using it consistently, even if it makes things a bit harder from time to time.
(What was that you said once about the Perfect being the enemy of the Good, Chief? You were talking about teamwork at the time, and you were absolutely right.)
Anyway, it turns out that we can apply that business about "common communications" and "common vocabulary" to more than just radios.
About the same time the FIRESCOPE team was designing ICS, the Department of Defense hired the smartest folks they could find to develop a system of common communications among their computers. They did it by giving all those computers, made by various companies and operated by various branches, agencies and institutions, a common vocabulary.
They called that common vocabulary the Internet Protocols.
The computer boom of the early `80s led inevitably to the network boom of the late `80s and early `90s. You might think everyone would have adopted the methods those smart folks, paid with our tax dollars, had developed. After all, they'd already been proven effective, reliable and economical. But that isn't what happened.
Why not? Simple: There was no "Internet, Inc." to print glossy brochures or to take us to lunch and explain this technology to us. The Internet wasn't a corporate product; it was more like a giant Information Mutual Aid system. It didn't have a marketing department. Because we'd grown to rely so heavily on our vendors for information about new technologies, we didn't hear much about that option.
Precisely because it was the best deal on the block, the relatively thin profit margins on Internet technologies caused vendors to promote their own proprietary systems instead. The marketing principle of "product differentiation," aligned with their hopes for follow-on sales of equipment and services to a captive market, ensured that we'd be offered everything except the best.
(Please don't misunderstand me here, Chief. I'm not blaming our vendors for being vendors. The fault, if any, lies in ourselves for letting our vendors do our thinking for us.)
As a result, a whole generation of networks (that's roughly seven to ten years worth) was fragmented and incompatible, beset with squabbles and failures of communication to rival those of any former East European nation.
By the mid-90s, of course, the Internet had become a consumer commodity. By that time, though, a lot of public-safety departments had already bought into proprietary systems. Like characters in a Mark Twain story, a lot of decision-makers found it hard to admit they'd been had.
But what goes around comes around. A lot of those old systems are about due for replacement now. Meanwhile, the trend toward turning everything voice, pictures and data into streams of interchangeable digital bits has spawned new opportunities for better service and more effective expenditures. With luck, this time we'll have learned enough to take advantage of the interoperability (and the competitive procurement) Internet-based systems offer.
Am I proposing that we share our communications with teenage chat rooms? Absolutely not! There are well-known and proven methods for keeping things separate: encryption, network firewalls, virtual private network "tunneling" and various others. It's like radio: just because anyone can go to Radio Shack and buy a portable radio doesn't mean they're going to share our new trunking system.
The Internet and ICS developed at the same time and for many of the same reasons. As we move toward integrated digital communications, we can take advantage of what the best computer scientists in the world have learned about networks that work. And we should carefully examine the agenda of anyone who tries steer us any other way.
