FDNY Tech Chief Recalls Early CAD Days at Communications

Dec. 18—As dispatching becomes quicker, more reliable and more precise for firefighters and emergency medical personnel, JonPaul Augier, a soon-to-retire New York City Fire Department official, hopes to take his place among the tech leaders who helped build those better systems.

He has a case.

The outgoing deputy commissioner of infrastructure and innovation told Government Technology that the "crowning achievement" of his 27-year career — which includes a medal for his response to a fire in Chinatown in 2009, according to FDNY Insider — was deploying the department's FireCAD system with Accenture.

The $22 million system, launched in 2021, replaced the 45-year-old STARFIRE CAD technology. FireCAD promised less dispatch downtime, a more intuitive interface, the ability to get relevant data to dispatchers in faster fashion, easier ways to make security patches and other features.

"There's been a huge learning curve" when it comes to the fire department's adoption of new technology, Augier said in what amounted to an exit interview before his planned departure at the end of the month. "But now we are cooking with gas."

His experiences might seem unique, given that he works for the largest fire department in the U.S., an agency that has dealt with major terrorists attacks, massive storms and other emergencies that make national or international news. But what he's been through can certainly inform other public safety tech improvement efforts, among the hottest areas in government technology.

For example, the deployment of FireCAD has not always been smooth.

According to reports from New York City media, the system crashed in its early days — specifically, at least three separate outages that produced an hour of downtime that required dispatchers to use paper and pencil to guide responders to emergencies.

According to one report, Augier blamed an outage on a contractor pushing two power-off buttons by mistake — an example, perhaps, of the best laid plans going south because of fouls that few could foresee.

In fact, as Augier told Government Technology, technology can hardly be separated from human concerns, so to speak. As a third-generation New York City firefighter — his father, grandfather, cousins and even uncles worked for the department, and Augier helped locate the remains of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001 — he said he was probably content to "remain a firefighter in Harlem."

Then a captain impressed upon him the importance of "never saying no when (the higher-ups) ask you to do something," even if that might be outside your regular professional world — a.k.a. "stretch opportunities."

That eventually led him to jobs focusing on training, administration and technology, including work helping to oversee the "unglamorous work" vital to making sure the fire department keeps current with all the new tools and services out there.

That includes, Augier said, the installation of fiber-optic cable to improve FDNY communications, a project that still has about two years left to go. As he put it, the fiber-optic cable is an investment in a still largely unknown future, given that its extremely low relative latency can handle the "emerging technologies that are coming out."

He's talking about biometrics, the Internet of Things, monitors that track the air supply of firefighters in real time and other tools — issues he might still be dealing with as he prepares to enter the private sector in a tech role, though he declined to share more details.

He just about summed up the ongoing gov tech evolution of public safety when he described just how vital that supposedly unglamorous work is.

"It requires information to move quickly," Augier said.

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