What CAD actually does, and what it does not
Dispatch, unit recommendation, status tracking and the interfaces that hang off it — and why the answer to most integration questions is 'that depends on your CAD vendor'.
Data and AI
NERIS, records management, dashboards that answer a real question, and a clear-eyed look at where AI genuinely helps versus where it adds a confident-sounding layer between a chief and the facts.
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Problems in this area
NFIRS and NERIS reporting eats a shift
Company officers spend an hour per incident on documentation, and the data quality that results is poor enough that nobody trusts the analysis built on it.
We collect data nobody ever looks at
Years of incident records sit in a system while staffing and deployment decisions get made on impressions and anecdote.
Learning
Learning LabRecords management and the move to NERIS
What is changing, what your vendor should already be doing about it, and what your department has to do regardless of vendor.
Reading your own incident data
Response time distributions, why averages mislead, and the handful of measures that actually inform a deployment decision.
Dashboards people actually open
Designing around a standing decision rather than around available fields.
AI for the fire service: what it is good at
A working explanation of what these systems do, where they are reliable, and where confident output should not be trusted.
AI governance and policy
Writing policy before deployment: accountability, records implications, and what you tell the public.
Premium
Still in development
Innovation LabAI incident command assistants
Systems that monitor radio traffic and incident data to surface missed benchmarks, unassigned tasks, or crews past their air-time window.
Why it matters
The promise is a second set of eyes on the things an IC drops under load. The risk is a confident recommendation that is wrong, and an IC who has stopped checking. Worth watching closely and adopting slowly.
Computer vision fire detection
Automated smoke and fire detection from fixed cameras, increasingly extended to structure fires and industrial monitoring.
Why it matters
Genuinely operational in wildland detection. The interesting question is whether it transfers to structural and industrial settings, where false positives are far more costly.
Peer experience
Mutual AidHas anyone integrated ESO with First Due?
Running ESO for EMS records and looking at First Due for fire. Both vendors say it is supported. Looking for someone who has actually run it in production.
How is your NERIS migration actually going?
Vendor says we are ready. Our data says otherwise. Curious whether anyone has completed a clean migration and what they had to fix first.
Staffing and callback apps for a combination department
Need something volunteers will actually open. We have tried two systems and adoption died within a month both times.