Changing Culture, Strengthening Delivery

Environment Agency: Floodline Warnings Direct

 

 

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Transcript

Caption: Delivering a more effective service using technology

 

TONY DEAKIN: Technology Manager

Back in August 2000 there was a major flood around England and Wales, and one of the things that we needed to do was to look at our current systems that we used, and although they were good at the time we needed to improve on those.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT: Business Centre Manager

Previously we had, at each of our area incident rooms, a stand-alone automatic voice messaging system that sent out warnings for the local area.

 

TONY DEAKIN:

As a national organisation we needed to have one national system, and there were lots of benefits from that. We would streamline the systems that we use in procedures, more accurate security, more response on maintenance, and also there’d be some efficiency savings.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT:

Our technology partner was Fujitsu Services, and we work with them very closely from the onset, so we involve them very much in the design phase of the system. We also worked with our professional partners, that’s the sort of emergency services, local authorities, utility companies, and we did surveys to actually find out what their requirements are.

 

ROGER CARTER:

Principal Emergency Planning Officer Leeds City Council

Through those consultations what they needed to do was identify what’s important to us in terms of when do we need to know, how do we need to know, what are the different methods. And I think that as part of that we were also able to give a bit of insight in relation to what the community might also want out of it too.

 

MARTIN DOVE: Local Resident

Since the 2000 event what we’ve had is a massive change in technologies, mobile phones, emails, texting have all become available, so they’ve kept abreast of that, rightly, and so we can be contacted very easily and very readily.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT:

You need to harness the technology that’s out there, but you need to have a very close eye on what your customer requirements are. You mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we are providing a service for all people and we need to make sure that their needs are catered for, so the pace of change needs to be tempered by the customer requirement.

 

ANGELA VINAND: Flood Incident Manager Officer

This is the first page. We used to send messages to professional partners and to members of the public to receive a flood warning. From the public and the partner’s point of view they have to acknowledge that they’ve received it by pressing one. If they then don’t it will try another method of contacting them. So if their first chosen method is to receive a telephone call they may choose option two as their mobile, so if they’re not at home they can actually then receive it on their mobile, and it will try them. So they are going to get the message in one form or another.

 

FILM CLIP

 

TONY DEAKIN:

Initially, some staff were quite reluctant. They liked our current systems that we use, they was happy with them, they thought they did the job, and to try and win them over to the new Floodlines Warning Direct, we got them, again, similar to Fujitsu, got them involved from the start. We did user testing. We also had initial meetings to invite them to ask what they wanted from the system as well.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT:

Through that we built confidence in the system and ownership. In 2007 we had a real major nationwide event, so it was really put through its paces then, and I think if there were any sort of lingering doubts about its capability they were put to rest at that point.

 

MARTIN DOVE:

There’s a very start code, which is a bit scary, which comes out and it essentially is a wake-up call to say there could be flooding. And given we’ve got one or two small businesses as well are private properties here, being able to phone directly in to the incident room and say, you know, this is Talaton by water, what is actually happening? You get very much more precise information.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT:

We looked for opportunities where we could get funding from external sources. We put in a bid jointly with the Met Office for the Treasury’s Investor Save bid and we were successful in attracting funding through that route. We also worked with the Met Office as our partners to see whether we could develop a warning system that met their needs.

 

ROGER CARTER:

What we’ve been able to do is actually say to businesses, sign up to this, it’s free, it doesn’t cost anything, and along the river area in the centre of Leeds, virtually all businesses have done that.

 

MARTIN DOVE:

We’ve all realised that our climate, our world’s changing and we’ve got to be all involved.

 

TONY DEAKIN:

I think one of the most important things to do is to make sure that you regularly review everything that you’ve done, so you go back every year and say, right, this is where we are today, this is what we’ve done, and we achieved the benefits we initially said we would do. If not, you can deliver them in successive years.

 

CHRIS HAGGETT:

I think we need to keep on top of technology as it develops and have a system that is adaptable. It’s a story of continuing improvement.

 

End of Transcript

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