How a 911 call becomes an incident, how units are recommended and dispatched, how apparatus status and location are tracked, and why so many other department systems depend on CAD.
Computer-Aided Dispatch is one of the central systems in a fire department's technology environment. It receives incident information from the emergency communications center, identifies resources, supports unit recommendation and dispatch, records unit status and timestamps, and exchanges information with other systems. CAD does not automatically make every connected system interoperable. How data enters and leaves the CAD depends heavily on system architecture, interfaces, standards, configuration, and vendor capabilities.
If you read one thing on this subject, read this.
The federal statement of what a CAD system should be able to do, written for public agencies rather than by a vendor.
Why it matters
Gives you a neutral yardstick to hold a CAD proposal against, instead of comparing one vendor's feature list to another's.
A national look at where CAD integration, GIS and 911 data consistency actually stand.
Why it matters
Useful confirmation that the integration problems in your department are structural, not a local failure.
Everything above was published by someone else, and is here because it is the clearest treatment of the subject we could find and verify. The Hub’s own guide to this topic is still being written. If you know a better source than the ones listed, that is worth telling us before it is.
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