Episode 252: Empowering Fire Chiefs with Data-Driven Decision-Making with David Blankinship & Marcus Edwards

Episode notes

Here’s how interoperability makes the fire service’s jobs easier:

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

What is interoperability, and how does it support better decision-making?

How do seamless user experiences and automated data collection reduce the burden on firefighters?

What are solutions that tackle critical issues in staffing, payroll, fleet management, and more in the fire service?

Hear from David Blankinship - the President of Emergent - and Marcus Edwards - the founder and CEO of Stationwise .

In this episode, StationWise and Emergent, two companies revolutionizing the fire service through technology, share how they are solving real-world problems for fire departments. StationWise focuses on staffing software, payroll, and workforce management, while Emergent addresses operational basics like fleet and call management.

Both companies aim to create a seamless user experience by automating data collection, reducing administrative burdens on firefighters, and emphasizing the importance of interoperability between systems. By providing fire chiefs with accurate, accessible information, StationWise and Emergent enable better decision-making, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of fire departments.

So take a listen to hear what they have to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro to the FRI miniseries
2. 0:36 David Blankinship and Marcus Edwards join at FRI
3. 1:16 What StationWise does
4. 2:22 What Emergent does
5. 4:15 Designing software that just works
6. 8:30 Interoperability and vendor lock-in
7. 10:30 What connected data could show a chief
8. 11:37 Who owns the data
9. 13:30 Run it like a business: data that moves
10. 15:53 Parting thoughts on adopting new tech
11. 17:42 Show people what better looks like
12. 19:36 Technology is changing in good ways
13. 20:32 Wrap

Questions answered in this episode

What problem does StationWise solve for fire departments?

Marcus Edwards says StationWise is staffing software for the fire service that focuses on staffing, payroll, and managing the workforce. He describes staffing and payroll as an unsexy problem that hasn't been solved, and payroll automation tends to be the main reason departments switch.

Hear it at 1:16

What does Emergent do for fire departments?

David Blankinship says Emergent manages fleets with live telemetry from fire trucks, equipment stored in trucks, and gear firefighters wear. It also manages calls and occupancies so data about where things happen is automated. The goal is to reduce the burden on firefighters to do reporting and data collection, because trucks, gear, and wearables can talk to the system.

Hear it at 2:20

Why is interoperability important in fire service software?

Marcus Edwards says when he interviewed about 40 fire chiefs across 12 states, the number one thing that came up was technology, and the number one word was interoperability. Departments have seven to 10 different software vendors and none of them communicate together. Some vendors charge four to eighty thousand dollars for a single integration.

Hear it at 8:30

How can connected data help with firefighter health and safety?

Marcus Edwards explains that by combining staffing data and operational data, departments could track mandatory overtime, consecutive work hours, and sleep deprivation. For example, if a firefighter went on calls and got no sleep, that information paired with incident narratives could identify potential trauma exposure.

Hear it at 8:30

What is the biggest barrier to technology adoption in the fire service?

Marcus Edwards says the risk aversion of public safety and government not wanting to try new things is the biggest barrier. He adds that change management on the culture and people side is a much bigger barrier than the technology itself, and users need to be excited by the opportunity rather than worried.

Hear it at 16:30

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 252 transcript

Empowering Fire Chiefs with Data-Driven Decision-Making with David Blankinship & Marcus Edwards

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, David Blankinship, Marcus Edwards

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Sofen. In this FRI miniseries, we're taking a closer look at how technology and smart solutions are shaping the future of the fire service. From the role of artificial intelligence and assessments to cutting edge tools like wildfire drones, each episode dives into how these advancements are improving firefighter safety, efficiency, and real-time decision-making. Stay tuned for some great conversations with the innovators pushing our fire service forward. Enjoy. All right, the end of day two at FRI and fortunate to be sitting alongside David Blankinship, president of Emergent and Marcus Edwards, co-founder and CEO of StationWise. Marcus and David, how are you guys doing?

[0:46] Marcus Edwards: Doing well. Happy to be here.

[0:48] David Blankinship: Awesome, man. Thanks for having us.

[0:49] Kevin Sofen: They're sharing a microphone and they're just like, it's almost like they're doing karaoke right now. So this is pretty great. And you guys are two guys that I really enjoy. just like crossing pathways, watching what you're doing on LinkedIn. You both are building unique tech for the fire service and solving real problems. And just to kind of get right into the skinny of it, I love to hear just like the 2024 August elevator pitch from a high-level perspective of what is StationWise and why does it exist, and then same with you, David, afterwards.

[1:16] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, can start. So StationWise is staffing software for the fire service. We started with that because we found that staffing, payroll, really communicating and managing your workforce across the fire service, especially kind of the unsexy problem that hasn't really been solved by anybody. So we focus really intensely on that, wanna be very good at it's a really complicated core tool and the only one that 100% of users in the fire department use from payroll to finance to end users to the fire chief. So we try to really design that well. And our goal is just to let everybody know there is a better solution out there. So we've tried to design around everything in mind, trying to build more than a better mousetrap and make it worth pulling out a very critical core tool that you're using every member, every day. So trying to do a lot more than just replace the wheel as you have it and build much more and make it actually worth the change management plus the better user experience and automating all the data that we can. The payroll automation tends to be the big reason folks switch. So a little bit on the pitch side, if you hate payroll or logging your hours, we can help with that for sure.

[2:18] Kevin Sofen: Fire fires, not software.

[2:20] David Blankinship: Exactly. I love how he says that. For us, we have a very similar philosophy at Emergent. We care so much about data, and we've been so long in this business, you know, in our careers in fire departments and with software companies that we really wanted to do something that focused on operational basics. We manage the fleets with live telemetry, you know, from the fire trucks, from the equipment we store in fire trucks, from the equipment firefighters wear. That just has to be seamless, and that kind of integration has gotten much easier over the years. We also want to manage the calls, you know, all the things that we do, we manage the places where everybody goes. So occupancies, calls, fires, patients, all of that stuff to us has to have at least two things that really work. It has to be what we're doing and where we're doing it and all that data is available and automated. So we are trying to really reduce the cognitive demand and the demand we've historically put on firefighters to do a bunch of reporting and data collection. The trucks talk to us, the gear talks to us, the wearables talk to us, you know, the video and IoT devices are talking to us. And we have robust communications, you know, with the advent of broadband in those trucks with FirstNet, those kinds of things are really possible. So moving that data wherever it needs it used to be so siloed up, like Marcus is talking about, like you'd have inspectors doing inspections in buildings. So it's, you know, patently boring. You know, it's a repetitive compliance kind of thing. But none of that data that we knew about code violations, about bad things in buildings, about systems that weren't working, could ever make it to a firefighter that was actually responding to that building, the person who arguably needed it the most. So all this is just an easy sort of automated pattern to be able to vacuum up data. And the software is just something that we can make firefighters' lives a lot easier, make a lot of that pain go away. One thing I like that both of you guys are working on in different contexts is software and then using software to kind of go back to what you both had mentioned, kind of like dealing with the basics, dealing with, you know, the fundamentals of what the fire department needs to be able to operate to make better decisions. I love that idea that we mentioned earlier, too, of just some of the best technologies when that works, you're not even thinking about it, and software very much is a sort of new breed of technology that's within the fabric of the DNA of firefighters and public safety. I'd love to hear kind of both your take in terms of like how you guys are designing and continue to kind of create technology software that sort of just works and in sort of how have you approached that and in sort of as well as giving any other insights to how you know how to continue to design technology software that's really purpose driven and in making firefighters

[5:05] Kevin Sofen: lives better faster easier

[5:07] David Blankinship: yeah I'll start Marcus we'll have a lot to say about this too but I think I can speak for both of us when we say you sort of back to the drawing board and you're not trying to cobble together legacy things with old ideas, you start with, what do we do and why do we do it? And you fundamentally ask those questions like, why are we doing what we're doing? In a lot of cases, we've found that it's just sort of something that evolved over time. And it's old systems that people are afraid to change out. Public safety tends to be slower technology adopters. But I think both of us have found that they're really not afraid to try something new as much as the systems have been so antiquated and old and boring and difficult to use and move data or even to get your own data out of that departments are really hesitant to change. So when we do these things, it's designed to almost make technology disappear. So in our case, we want to think about the trucks and the gear and the of things that are already reporting, wheels turn, brakes set, water pumps, you know, and the equipment knows that. And so if we just listen to that, then why do I need to have a firefighter fill out a report about when they got there or what they did or push status heads and things like that? So thinking about what we're actually doing and how it works with technology means that the software layer that we have is designed to know who's doing what and where, and to ask them the right questions or give them that nugget of information they need. So knowing that it just helps us design systems that get clean and simple, like your favorite apps on an iPhone, that's how people use technology. And we don't want to put the burden of data collection and technology on people. There's complex things that happen, but they don't need to be complex things to track and manage. And I think the other thing that I would think of, and then I'll let Marcus really amplify some of this, is that information needs to be without barriers. It's fire departments that own data. It's fire departments that do this work. And they are focused on a life safety and property saving mission. And the things that enable that don't need to be the main things that we do. And so we're truly committed to interoperability. The data that comes out of either one of these systems flows to the other one. And we want to put fire chiefs back in control. They need to be in charge at fire departments their own autonomy. And I think in a practical sense, that means put the best athlete in the race. If there's operational software or records management or anything that, or staffing or payroll that somebody does, you need to be able to pull a system out that's bad and put one in that's better and let them compete against one another. What we tend to see in the industry is a ton of like vendor locking. You make data really hard to get out are really complicated in a database. So it costs enormous time and effort to use it, or move it, or switch a system. And so of course that's by design. You want to be sticky as a software company, so that's an old school mentality. But we're much more like the software is the way we use it. So anything that we collect needs to flow into StationWise or other software. Anything that they do with staffing needs to be available on the fire ground so we know who's on what power trucks, so that freedom of data movement is, I'd say maybe one of the most important things we think about.

[8:30] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, wow, plenty of thoughts to add onto that. Obviously, actually, when I started StationWise, I was at Stanford for Business School and interviewed about 40 fire chiefs across 12 states and said, what keeps you up at night? What would you change if you could change anything? And the number one thing that came up across over 90% of departments was technology. The number one word though was interoperability, like you alluded to. It's like I have seven to 10 different software vendors. All of these systems are required to just run my department just to keep the lights running and none of them communicate together. Even worse, many of these vendors have now become incentivized not to communicate, to have their own data to say that it's four to $80,000 if you're a CAD vendor, to integrate one time with that vendor. It makes no sense. And it's not really good to think of running a business set around public safety budgets, around nickel and diming those budgets. So what we like to think about is, or like at StationWise especially, just alluding to what you said, there's the workflow piece, make the user experience seamless. Think of how do they do things today. So in a fire department, you print out a roster. So we have a print roster view on our staffing tool. We didn't say, you're never gonna print this, why don't you use the digital version? Because we know how it works. And more vendors should be able to meet folks halfway and understand the customers they sell to. But we can also make the workflow much better and say, Hey, there are things you do today that are really clunky, that you're just doing for compliance, that are in no way helping the user experience or you're just logging data in a more pain. way, or a less, you know, consistent one. So we like to do is say, we'll help with that workflow piece, make it seamless, ideally automate most of it, because a lot of it can be. And then when you think of that, after the fact, what do we do with the data, instead of trapping it in a silo, like our motto is data for decisions, not reports, you have all these compliance reports, everything that it's just a ream of data that never gets looked at again. And what we get excited by is more, how do you pair things together? How do you really emphasize interoperability? And for a lot of fire chiefs today, interoperability means my scheduling tool sends to my incident reporting tool who is on each apparatus, and that's it. They consider that fully integrated. Well, if StationWise and Emergent work together with the department, for example, we could identify, you know, when they have more mandatory overtime shifts and how many they have in a month, and the frequency, for example, just how many max consecutive work hours they're working or if they've exceeded the limit at any point. And then if we take Emergent's data, we could also say, hey, here's the time that this individual went out on calls and they didn't get any sleep last night. Now we're looking at sleep deprivation at potentially the narratives to see if a juvenile was involved in something could be traumatic. So if you think of building more health dashboards or responsiveness for how do I put in the hands of these decision makers the real dashboards to make decisions, it's probably not a table that just spits out the data. So it's definitely two parts of both build those workflows and design the software, and then also by partnering with other companies, by taking in the data, and then also, importantly, not nickel and diming for it, you know, create that interoperability in a way chiefs might not even imagine is possible.

[11:37] Kevin Sofen: Well, in addition to you guys sharing the same microphone and doing karaoke maybe on this podcast or later, you guys seem to have this same data mantra that comes through this whole idea of interoperability, but it comes back to the word you both have probably said 10 times in the podcast, which is data. The whole idea of this data becoming something that's just as, you know, almost like oxygen. We breathe it and we use it just like on a daily basis for a million different things. I'd love to hear more about kind of this idea of data being something that's woven into everything we do, but also particularly about some of the concerns that exist about this is my data, this is the company's data, is it the fire department's data, who has access to my data, is it being used against me. That seems to be one of the biggest trends that I just kind of concerns I hear about. So we'd love to hear both your guys' thoughts on that conversation.

[12:28] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, I can take off and then hand it over. I would say definitely on the police side, especially, or just more public safety versus pure fire. We are seeing a lot of the we're worried about it being on the cloud, worried about our own, you know, integrity of the data. Or if they're bad actors, for example, you don't want them having police data. But really, by and large, especially on the fire side, a lot of it is fire chiefs and firefighters are not data analysts. They should not need to be. We shouldn't ask that of them. There are great analysts in the fire service that can give a great perspective to it. But when you think of a given fire department, it should be more focused on how do we enable them to again, make those decisions that they need. And the biggest way to do it is not siloing their data and saying, you do own it. We aren't going to, you know, we're going to keep it very secure and private, but we're not going to, and we're not going to just sell it to the highest bidder. But we also want to make sure that, you know, you can have the data connected to any other partner that you need. It's secure, but it's not trapped. So I would say that's the biggest thing, making sure we focus on that workflow piece and not, okay, the data is in our system, we'll never let you get it out or never let you export it. We want to make that part really easy.

[13:30] David Blankinship: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I would say that, one thing that we've seen over the years is not just the difficulty to get data out, but this idea that, somehow the software company by its nature, you know, if it was staffing or for its operations, or if it was records management or CAD or whatever. It tends to be data that if you could do analysis on it's sort of like on that data set. But if you think about what we really are trying to know as we're trying to understand our communities and how to interact with them, where the problems are, how we do things, how effective are we? So if you thought about it less as running a fire department or an EMS agency or something like that and thought more about how you would run a business, the questions you're asking are business questions. are we delivering value for this? How well are we doing? How well are our people doing? Are we keeping them safe? Are we eliminating risk? Are we managing those things? And if you just have tiny bits of information siloed in software that only lets you ask a few questions or print out a few sort of summary reports of what's in them, you're never actually acting like a business. And so data that moves is just food for analysis. So there's terrific analysis packages out there, but they require really good clean data to input. So these are fundamental things that we're collecting so that people that are analysts either with software packages that do analysis or more and more we find people that are terrific at Power BI or Tableau or things like that, and they need access to all the data, not just from their department, but externally too. So if we want to understand our activity in the lens of demographics or patterns of crime or other things that have influence and understand, then that data, we just need to stop talking about it in a way that it's like, I'm going to spend weeks or months trying to get data out so I can do something with it. And it just needs to be the assumption that it all works interoperably. and then some smart person from the department or from outside or wherever can just ask it questions. Just like you and I would use ChatGPT or Perplexity or one of those things, data that's aggregated and data that can be looked at together is data that a normal person can ask a normal question. And that's the world we're beginning to really live in.

[15:53] Kevin Sofen: So we're getting somewhat pushed off the floor here and they're cleaning up and getting these out here shortly. But to let's say kind of final parting thoughts and this is a much longer conversation I will continue to dive into and excited to see the next steps and all things Emergent and StationWise, but any sort of parting thoughts and maybe gearing it to the firefighter and the fire service in terms of how to think about some of this new age of tech and how it's being woven into their operations and maybe kind of overcoming any sort of the concerns or any sort of words of wisdom, insights to continue to, you know, consider adoption of this type of new software data integration within their operations.

[16:30] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, just quickly on my end, I would say everyone likes to say firefighters hate two things, change and the way things are. So one of those has to change, right? You either don't like the way things are or you want it to change. I would say that risk aversion that David alluded to of just public safety and governments not wanting to try things. That's the biggest thing that I see needing to change. So if the fire service wants to expect more from its vendors and to get more out of it, just try and maybe like pilots, you know, we're trying to work on things like that, where it's not the full commitment. but there needs to be more try something out. Don't say, we're stuck with this and this is the way this is because we have seen some of that, especially on the staffing rules side, a bit of defeatism of there's no way to change it. So just showing that there is a different way and we can change some of those processes, getting around the change management piece, really on like the culture and people side, way more than the technology is still a big barrier. So I would say just getting users and especially your union members, not just admin really comfortable with the change and excited by it, not a worrying thing their potential new technology, because technology and the fire service don't always mix, and just getting folks excited by the opportunity instead of worried about the potential issues that could happen, like pointing them to, here's what good looks like by showing them those examples.

[17:42] David Blankinship: I think that's a pretty good segue, like the examples and showing people like, people can understand when something's better when they see it. And so we don't always have to, you know, give them a decision about whether or not they should change or could change. You know, like I think people sort of start with no on that, but we have both found that when you just focus on what people are actually doing in the work, it gets a lot simpler. You know, if you're a firefighter, you love being a firefighter, but you don't love being a data reporter or report writer. You're in chaotic environments and you want to know what you need to know at that moment. And when you're done with that incident or finishing that incident, you need a report that takes 80% less time to do. So we make a lot of automated data collection that makes the reporting go away by up to 80 or more percent. And that's, you know, when you get back on the engine and your report's done, that's way better. You know, like, that kind of thing is just an example of, if you just think about what they have to do and the burden that's on them all the time, and that goes away. Like, if staffing and payroll are automated, if operations, you know, my reports get easier, I have better intel about where I'm going. My anxiety about getting there, if I know what I'm going to experience there, just dies off. And so they know what right looks like, so we don't have to talk about it as much in terms of choosing whether or not to adopt new technology. It's like, if I don't have to do the reporting, if I know what's going on before I get there, if I can know something's breaking before it breaks, those kinds of things just make a hard job a lot easier.

[19:18] Kevin Sofen: I mean, if you could save a couple hours every week and use that to go home early to go to your kids' soccer practice or focus on the task at hand, it seems like a very practical use case in terms of ways that, again, technology and data is working in the background and making our lives better, faster, safer, easier.

[19:36] David Blankinship: Yeah, all of us know that technology is changing so fast and it's changing in really good ways. It's easier to ask questions. It's easier to search for things. It's easier to do your work from email to creating and writing reports, or whatever your thing is, and if you just think about how you or your kids use ChatGPT or something, that's how you should sort of think. about technology is there's a ton of input data, but the ability to operate and use that data to ask it questions or make decisions or, you know, get some clarity, I think has to be the focus. Firefighters and fire chiefs make hard decisions all the time, but the decisions shouldn't be hard in terms of like trying to get enough information to make, you know, a decision. You just need to be able to focus on like, what are we talking about and what should we do about it? And that's really what we see a modern generation of software doing now, and it's really changing.

[20:32] Kevin Sofen: Cheers, well, David and Marcus, you guys are on the cutting edge. You're excited to continue to talk shop and collaborate with you guys, so thanks for what you're doing. Enjoy the rest of your show, and we'll be in touch.

[20:40] David Blankinship: See you, pal.

[20:41] Kevin Sofen: Thank you.

[20:42] Marcus Edwards: Till next time.

[20:45] Kevin Sofen: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Smart Firefighting Podcast. I truly would love to know what you think. Send me a note, post something on Twitter, and if you were so inclined, give us a review on one of the podcast channels that you listen to. Have a great day, and hope to hear from you soon.