NICE Inform Elite for Public Safety in ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards

With NICE Inform Elite, NICE has reinvented 911 recording to give emergency communications centers the tools they need to improve their operations today while also preparing for what’s coming next.
With NICE Inform, NICE has reinvented 911 recording to give emergency communications centers the tools they need to improve their operations today while also preparing for what’s coming next.

NICE Inform Elite is a NENA i3-compliant, cloud-ready solution designed to support a 911 center’s complete multimedia recording needs, which includes:

  • Telephony
  • P25 radio
  • Screen recording
  • SMS texts
  • Next Generation 911/112/999/000 audio and text
  • NG911 Enhanced Data EIDD
  • FirstNet and ESN LTE broadband audio, and more.

NICE Inform captures, manages, and synchronizes multi-channel interactions between citizens, 911 centers and first responders to provide a complete, true record of incidents.

NICE Inform assembles telephony and radio communications into an authentic incident timeline along with SMS 911 texts, GIS, screen recordings, video and other multimedia, for comprehensive insight into the ‘who, what, when, where and why’ of incidents.

This is critical for incident reconstructions and investigations, and also for compliance and quality assurance.

The newest edition of NICE Inform, NICE Inform Elite, goes far beyond traditional emergency communications recording solutions to deliver incident intelligence that empowers 911 centers to improve their operational performance, provide better quality service and make smarter decisions.

NICE Recording Platform

NICE Inform Elite adds four new core capabilities on top of Inform’s already robust applications.

These include:

  • CAD Incident Analytics to enhance incident reconstruction and automate quality assurance workflow
  • Incident Intelligence dashboards for real-time tracking of performance targets and trends
  • GIS mapping for improved incident visualization and analysis, and
  • A future-ready multimedia recording platform

IMPROVING OPERATIONS TODAY… PREPARING FOR WHAT’S NEXT

Next Generation 911, Text-to-911, FirstNet LTE, increasing citizen needs and expectations, and new Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement standards are all dramatically changing the Public Safety landscape.

With NICE Inform Elite, NICE has reinvented 911 recording to give emergency communications centers the tools they need to improve their operations today while also preparing for what’s coming next.

Advanced CAD Incident Analytics Enhances Incident Reconstruction and Automates QA

A critical function of emergency communications centers involves fulfilling audio reproduction requests for district attorneys, investigators and other requesters.

911 Centers typically handle thousands of such requests annually.

NICE Inform Elite’s CAD Incident Analytics streamlines this process by eliminating unnecessary steps and improving search precision. Users can now bypass the CAD system and type the CAD incident ID/report number directly into Inform Elite.

All multimedia recordings related to the incident (emergency calls, radio, screens and SMS texts) are instantly retrieved and merged onto one timeline, along with CAD event data — showing when the initial call was answered, when units were dispatched, and when they arrived on scene.

These audio reproductions can be saved and securely shared.

Karin Marquez, Communication Supervisor for the Westminster (CO) Police Department
Karin Marquez, Communication Supervisor for the Westminster (CO) Police Department

“I am very excited about NICE Inform Elite,” said Karin Marquez, Communication Supervisor for the Westminster (CO) Police Department.

“It takes the guesswork out of trying to match CAD records to audio recordings – it does it for me automatically.”

“Inform Elite has already cut my audio request fulfillment time in half.”

“It also provides a much clearer picture of how incidents were handled, in terms of what actions were taken, by whom, and when – which is essential for investigations, compliance and quality assurance.”

Inform Elite’s CAD Incident Analytics also helps 911 centers comply with the APCO/NENA Quality Assurance and Quality Improvement (QA/QI) standard, which recommends that 911 centers review all calls involving high acuity and catastrophic events.

NICE Inform Elite automates this process by applying CAD incident type classifications, severity and other parameters to automatically select and schedule calls for QA review.

Delivering Incident Intelligence to 911 Centers

We’ve all heard the saying “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Nowhere is this truer than in the emergency communications center where call handling, response times and quality of service can literally mean the difference between life and death.

All emergency communication centers have performance targets they strive to meet – but it’s not always easy to effectively and efficiently track performance against them.

It’s not uncommon for managers to spend hours upon hours compiling statistics and sorting through data. And in the final analysis, the results are neither timely nor accurate.

NICE Search Using CAD

NICE Inform Elite offers a better way.

NICE Inform Elite’s Incident Intelligence dashboards can help 911 centers stay on top of performance targets and out of the media spotlight.

The dashboards uniquely consolidate data from CAD, telephony, radio, and the NICE Inform Evaluator Quality Assurance system to provide near real-time snapshots of performance across multiple dimensions, including:

  • Call volumes and call durations
  • Speed of answer and hold times
  • Dispatches and dispatch times
  • On-scene response times
  • Quality assurance scores, and more

Managers even have the ability to drill down to listen to associated audio recordings for granular insights.

NICE Inform Elite’s Incident Intelligence drill-through dashboards give 911 center managers up-to-the-minute performance metrics, viewable on desktops, wallboards and mobile tablets.

All information is presented in easily digestible charts, graphs and maps.

Managers can also isolate metrics for different shifts, telecommunicators, CAD incident types, etc., to determine where staffing, training and operational improvements can be made.

Additionally, NICE Inform Elite indexes CAD comments to create word clouds which can be visualized through the dashboard.

The more frequently a word is used, the larger and closer to the center of the cloud it will appear.

Managers can click on words of interest to drill down to associated call recordings and data.

NICE Inform 8 Incident Intelligence Dashboard

GIS Mapping for Improved Incident Visualization and Early Situational Awareness

NICE Inform Elite’s Incident Intelligence dashboards, Quality Assurance and reconstruction modules are also now enhanced with GIS mapping which enables managers to view the geolocation of CAD incidents, emergency calls, radio communications and captured SMS texts on interactive GIS maps.

This provides a more in-depth visual context of events, with the ability to zoom in to specific locations, and drill down to multimedia recordings for investigations or QA reviews.

Because this information is updated in near real-time, it can also provide early situational awareness of potential large-scale events.

Dick Bucci, principal analyst, Pelorus Associates
Dick Bucci, principal analyst, Pelorus Associates

GIS heat maps can also be used for retrospective analysis, for example to visualize where certain types of crimes occur most often.

“With its release of NICE Inform Elite, NICE truly stands out as a public safety trend-setter and pioneer,” said Dick Bucci, principal analyst, Pelorus Associates.

“NICE has found a way to bring together data from the siloed systems that 911 centers use every day, to enable decision makers to visualize it in new ways, operationalize it, and extract hidden insights to improve operations.”

NICE Inform Elite in 2017 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program

The 2017 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program, organized to recognize the most distinguished vendors of Physical, IT, Port Security, Law Enforcement, First Responders, (Fire, EMT, Military, Support Services Vets, SBA, Medical Tech) as well as the Federal, State, County and Municipal Government Agencies – to acknowledge their outstanding efforts to ‘Keep our Nation Secure, One City at a Time.’

As an ‘ASTORS’ competitor, the NICE Inform Elite will be competing against the industries leading providers of 911 Recording and Analytics.

ASTORS HSA 2017 Good luck to NICE Inform Elite on becoming a Winner of the 2017 American Security Today’s Homeland Security Awards Program!

To learn more about NICE for Public Safety visit http://www.nice.com/protecting/what-we-do and http://www.nice.com/protecting/public-safety/nice-inform