Overview

Asset Data & Information (ADI) provides data and information support around location

intelligence, analysis, and mapping / visualisation for emergency response management.

This critical information helps make sense of the high-level, common operating environment

during emergencies:

location and type of incident

damage to Sydney Water's assets (water, wastewater, and stormwater) and on

assets belonging to other utilities (electricity, gas, telecommunications)

impact on the environment

where to send crews to minimise service disruption, and importantly to keep crews

safe

impact on customers who we need to keep informed about service disruptions and

what to expect, with timelines

These data-driven insights provide critical information for Emergency Response

Management - to understand and make sense of: 'What's happening where?' and 'What's

happening next?'.

This helps us plan and make decisions for least disruption of services to customers and

improves the customer experience.

Building a common operating environment

Acting on learnings from the October 2013 Blue Mountains bushfire emergency, ADI is

leading a project to identify business improvements for processes, people, information, and

technology.

We partnered as 'one team' across the business and with external agencies to 'create new

and better ways of doing things'. We're building capacity by enabling a common operating

environment with quick access to consolidated, up-to-date asset information across utilities.

Combined with the right tools and skills, this improves information intelligence for better

emergency response management.

Significant improvements to the way we operate during emergencies have been made

possible by exchanging information with external agencies, and harnessing their innovation

and tools for efficiencies, insights and intelligence that improves planning and decision-

making across the end-to-end process:

New Tools Information about the tool

Spatial

Information and

Mapping System

(SIMS)

Provides easy access to a single, integrated view of all asset

information across utilities, as the authoritative repository and database.

This is the Emergency Information Coordination Unit's (EICU's)

decision support tool that helps emergency response planning. Sydney

Water integrated its asset data to SIMS. It helps understand: 'What's

happening where?' - to see the impact of the incident on customers,

assets, the environment, and crews?'

Common

Operating Picture

(COP)

Enables predictive analysis. Rural Fire Service (RFS) provided this for

our use. It helps understand: "What's happening next?"

In addition, Google Earth has now been added to the suite of tools available to help share

spatial information with stakeholders - expanding capabilities provided by our existing GIS

(Hydra) and MapInfo.

Project benefits and outcomes

New developments introduced from this project combine to build information, insights and

intelligence capability that improves planning and decision-making for better emergency

response management. ADI's enhanced capability to produce visualisation (maps or pdfs)

and use mapping symbology, has improved services, as demonstrated in the table below:

ADI Service offerings Previous

capability

New, improved capability -

using mapping symbology

Search, locate, and identify incident eg

fire location (point) - Example 2

Search, locate, and identify incident eg

burned area (fire polygon) - Example 3

Produce a map or pdf of assets Example 1 Example 4

Produce a map or pdf of critical

customers Example 1 Example 5

Search, locate, and identify crew

locations - Example 6

Produce a map or pdf of crew locations - Example 6

Share data with other agencies - Example 7, Example 8, Example

9

Working with you

ADI thanks the 21 people interviewed (pdf) who shared their requirements and information

across the end-to-end emergency response process:

internal stakeholders: Business Strategy & Resilience, Customer Services, Service

Delivery, Liveable City Solutions

external agencies: Emergency Information Coordination Unit (EICU); Energy &

Utility Services Functional Area Coordination (EUSFAC); Rural Fire Service (RFS)

These contributions helped shape the new business process that improves access to the

right information, quickly, during an emergency.

Read more about the Emergency Response Management project (pdf) that facilitated

business improvement changes across process, people, information, and technology /

applications.

What's next? We look forward to ongoing partnering with EICU to consolidate all

emergency incident information into SIMS eg fire, floods, traffic etc. This will enhance an

integrated view of latest available information, and further reduce double handling of data.

Who to contact

The Asset Data & Information (ADI) Duty Manager is the liaison point of contact between

ADI and the Risk & Resilience team. Nominated Duty Managers are:

Contacts

Amandeep Singh Luke Freeman

Content ID: ICONN_CDF_DD_066554

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