Our company, netage.nl, has been active in the fire fighting business for over 10 years now. With a team of people, all close to or active in the job, we have learned a lot about how fire departments treat Information Technology. Over the years we have seen huge changes in the landscape of fire fighting and Information Technology. netage.nl however is not very pleased with what we see right now.
In the current hype of open data and open government initiatives, fire departments are confronted with huge amounts of data. The enormous amount of attention that goes out to open data applications on various platforms clearly underlines the problem we are facing: we are just trading the open data for mirrors and beads, they are shiny and grasp our attention, but are not tackling the real problems.
To really leverage the gained knowledge in all the open data, we need to start to act now and understand the language we speak within the fire department organizations and align that with the new possibilities in the IT landscape.This modern structure of organizing our newly found knowledge is in need of a fresh vision at the methods we use to interact with all this data.
Over the past 4 years netage.nl has been closely involved with our technology partner netlabs.org to develop a new framework for accessing information. You can find them under ‘technology partners’.
This blog is intended to share our ideas on how things should change in the fire fighting business, thereby improving the service to the public, reducing risks for the fire fighters and saving lives.