Traditionally, fire and rescue services maintain vast amounts of paper and digital documentation for all policy, procedure, training packs, equipment notes and other supplementary material. Adapting this content to support the national guidance may be no small feat, and fifty services doing it fifty times will inevitably produce a great deal of duplicated work requiring a large amount of resource. 

The Service Integration Tool is our answer to how we can best help services implement a digital-first approach to national operational guidance, allowing full integration of local policy and procedure into a standardised digital platform, all with minimal time, effort and resource required from the organisation. 

Best of all? Outside of setup and maintenance costs, the core product will be free to all fire and rescue services. 

Our vision

A fully integrated digital platform

We seek to provide each fire and rescue service with a locally branded version of the central NOG web platform, along with all the associated content, tools and features, for local use. Services would be able to display national operational guidance to their staff, fully integrated with local policy and procedure. 

A common suite of documentation

We intend to work with services to develop a set of nationally agreed templates for all common documents to support standardisation and true national collaboration in production and sharing of content. These templates will exist within the system and services will have the opportunity to work together to share the load in developing the product packs.

Collaborative development 

We plan to develop a central repository on ukfrs.com for services to share their content into. Other services could then download this content into their own system to either use wholesale or apply adjustments to specific fields to add their local requirements. 

Some documents, such as Equipment Notes, could be universally applicable and require no amendment between services. Others, such as Operational Information Notes, could have a mixture of generic and specific content where only the local policy and operational considerations fields would need adjusting.
 

Proposed process

The back end of the local platform would have the addition of a comprehensive workflow system, likely managed by those responsible for policy and training development in service. 

Whenever the national content is updated centrally the local system would pull the content from the central NOG database and place it into a queueing area. The content could then be prioritised, have tasks and resource allocated, local content and product packs applied and, following appropriate approvals, be published for all local staff to see. 

National updates would never be published on the local system without receiving the appropriate approvals.

The diagram below illustrates how the process could work to facilitate a local database of locally verified national guidance and a supporting culture of sharing best practice and reducing effort of policy production and maintenance. 

Service integration tool - proposed process
Steve Beakhust
Mon, 08/30/2021 - 11:50

Development

The project team conducted a series of discovery workshops with fire and rescue services during Summer 2017, capturing the demand and requirements for such a tool. 

From this, the development team produced a detailed technical specification and a supporting summary document that captures the core requirements of the tool. This was shared as part of the national Service Integration Tool consultation which ran in November 2017. To respond to the many great questions we received, we put together a further document to help provide greater clarity on the costings and the options available to your service.  You can check out these documents below.

The primary purpose of the consultation was to identify which model of adoption is most of interest to your service and when you feel you would be ready and able to take it on - absolutely no financial commitment is required at this stage.

Analysis of this information, in line with the development of the system infrastructure, will allow the development team to be able to determine the optimal and most cost-effective delivery model, which may vary between services.

Whether you eventually chose to take on the product as a service, region or otherwise, the key takeaway is that there are a number of adoption options and possibilities available at varying cost and our goal is to support you at the price you need to be supported at.

Consultation responses are currently being analysed and a response will be published as soon as possible. A phased release of the core product is expected from March 2018. 

If your service is interested in this tool and wishes to get involved in the collaborative development of product packs, simply get in touch with our friendly Business Change team - engagement@ukfrs.com.