Client success story
Country Fire Authority
Victoria’s volunteer fire service, operating across the state to reduce the occurrence and impacts of fire and other emergencies. Their advice and knowledge in fire behaviour, fire safety, incident management and community preparation adds further strength to Victoria’s trusted and united emergency services sector.
Challenge
The Country Fire Authority holds a wealth of historical, paperbased lessons and insights from their firefighters, collected over the last 165 years. “Loss of knowledge for private companies can often mean a loss of profit, but loss of knowledge within firefighting can mean the loss of lives” explained Stuart French, Program Manager, Knowledge, CFA. We needed to work with the CFA to find a solution to digitise and organise this large volume of knowledge in a way which allowed the firefighters within the CFA to easily find exactly what they needed, when they needed it.
Solution
Using an agile development methodology, we created a solution that combined historical evidence from a fire scene and collective knowledge about a specific area into one place where the team could access it. This gave firefighters fast access to historical information while breaking down the barriers between the head office, the 20 districts, and the 35,000 firefighters in the field today. The end result was a solution that has enabled districts to more easily share knowledge between crews based on competencies, their qualifications, and skills. Since the initial engagement with CFA in early 2019, oobe has delivered three major developments as part of this project, including the deployment of Elastic App Search as an enterprise search tool, the addition of contact search, along with a public site search capability. Since the implementation of these solutions, the organisation has seen an increase of 145% in search traffic across the organisation.