Customer Solution Case Study

Communications Solution Helps Ensure Public Safety for Milestone Event

"The magnitude of a security initiative like this requires that you coordinate all the information that comes out of the planning process. You can't do this properly without a technological edge."

Sheriff John Rutherford
Jacksonville Sheriff's Office

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The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) in Florida faced a challenge of unprecedented scope and scale: Provide security for the Super Bowl, a sporting event that attracts more than 100,000 spectators and is broadcast around the world to an estimated audience of 800 million people. JSO successfully planned and coordinated the efforts of more than 50 separate agencies at the local, county, state, and federal levels, relying on a collaboration solution based on Microsoft(R) Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003. Critical communications, which for previous Super Bowls were exchanged via countless paper documents and mismatched radio networks, were brought into E-Sponder, an incident management system that improved the security of the game and the events surrounding it, while maintaining homeland security in northeast Florida.

Situation
In 2000, when the National Football League named Jacksonville, Florida, as the site of Super Bowl XXXIX, league officials noted that Jacksonville, with its population of fewer than 1 million, was the smallest city ever to host the big game. But the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) saw it differently: Comprising 840 square miles in land area, Jacksonville is, in fact, the largest city in the continental United States. Moreover, under an unusual form of consolidated government in which the city of Jacksonville and the county of Duvall in which it lies are combined, responsibility for law enforcement across the entire region falls exclusively to JSO.

Given the size of the city and the fact that the St. Johns River cuts right through downtown, effectively splitting Jacksonville in two, JSO has a challenging job to do in protecting the lives and property of the citizens of the community every day. The area also boasts one of the largest deepwater port systems in the South Atlantic with four major port terminals, increasing the complexity of waterside security. Add the prospect of 130,000 hard-charging football fans along with some 4,000 credentialed members of the media arriving from out of town in the space of just a few days, and there is the potential for urban chaos.

Maintaining the Peace in an Unruly Environment
One of the overall goals going into planning for the event was to ensure that however big and raucous the festivities surrounding the Super Bowl might be, they would not get out of hand and threaten the peace of the city, its residents, and visitors. "This event presents a huge security challenge," says Lieutenant Randy Russell, Lead Planner for Super Bowl operations for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, "and an opportunity for us to do our very best to make sure that everybody has a good time, that they're safe and secure, and that they leave just the way they came."

The Super Bowl is more than just a momentous football game: It's a weeklong festival of parties, street fairs, charity events, civic celebrations, and corporate networking. Serious JSO planning for Super Bowl XXXIX began 18 months in advance of the February 6, 2005 event.

Super Bowl security was once a relatively simple matter of super-sized crowd and traffic control. But in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, protection against all manner of potential threats now requires unusually intricate precaution, extraordinary attention to detail, and flawless collaboration between public safety commanders and officers in the field.

Coordinating Efforts for Security The need for a higher level of security brings with it the need for a higher level of information sharing. For this year's event, the JSO coordinated the efforts of 53 local, county, state, and federal agencies concerned with public safety, including:

• Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department
• Florida Highway Patrol
• Florida Air National Guard
• NFL Security
• Federal Aviation Administration
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• U.S. Border Patrol
• U.S. Coast Guard
• U.S. Navy
• U.S. Office of Air and Marine Operations
• U.S. Secret Service

Reinforcing the JSO's staff of close to 2,000 patrol officers were more than 2,000 additional law enforcement and public safety personnel.

Long-range planning for Super Bowl week anticipated close to 6,000 discrete "planned events" requiring oversight, which were documented as Incident Action Plans (IAPs) on paper forms by the many participating agencies. One IAP, for example, might contain the time and route of a scheduled motorcade, another could document planned road closures, and others might comprise logistics of a concert or party. The IAPs outlined the chronology of every event expected to occur at each of the venues around Jacksonville.

For previous Super Bowls, this paper record was collected and archived in a reference library of three-ring binders. Communications with officers in the field was primarily by radio on the various frequencies employed by different agencies.

As the Super Bowl drew nearer, the data assembled by JSO planners grew unwieldy and became difficult not only to organize but also to differentiate for quality and importance. JSO needed a way to plan in greater detail and to coordinate innumerable law enforcement, security, and public safety activities during Super Bowl week.

Solution
"The key to providing precision security for an event on the scale of the Super Bowl is situational awareness--knowing the who, where, and why of what's going on at any given moment," says Sheriff John Rutherford, Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. The core business processes on which law enforcement relies, according to Rutherford, are Observe, Analyze, Report, and Respond. To enhance their ability to execute on these critical business processes, IT specialists in the Sheriff's Office required a real-time communications and collaboration platform.

Selecting a Solution to Enable Real-Time Collaboration Information technology staff in the JSO read reports of a solution that had been used successfully to manage security for the 2004 Presidential Debate in St. Louis, Missouri. JSO Information Technology Officer Beth Horn contacted Microsoft(R) Certified Partner Convergence Communications, which led to the decision to deploy E-Sponder, a solution that would help the JSO aggregate and make strategic use of the data in hundreds of Incident Action Plans. "The magnitude of a security initiative like this one requires that you have a failsafe way to coordinate and disseminate all the information that comes out of the planning process," according to Sheriff Rutherford. "You can't do this properly without a technological edge."

In early December 2004, after Convergence scoped the JSO's business challenge, deployment of E-Sponder began. The E-Sponder solution is based on the Microsoft Office System, including Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 on the desktop, Microsoft Office SharePoint(R) Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 on the back-end. Built using the Microsoft .NET Framework, the Web-based collaboration solution runs on the Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003 operating system and Exchange Server 2003, both part of Microsoft Windows Server System(TM) integrated server software. E-Sponder is accessed through the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 browser.

Convergence converted the accumulated Incident Action Plans into Microsoft Office InfoPath(R) 2003 forms to be stored in the E-Sponder forms library. Merging data from the forms, a centralized database was created and used to produce a master checklist of planned events. Convergence created a Microsoft .NET application to automatically extract time-specific events out of the IAP forms and a timeline was created on SharePoint Portal Server 2003, providing a detailed countdown beginning five days prior to the game.

Capturing Data on Unplanned Events During Super Bowl week, new data on unplanned events--such as changing traffic conditions and fire department and emergency medical activity--was logged into the system by officers in the field and supervisors at six command centers located throughout the city. There are few things more inimical to effective law enforcement than surprises: With E-Sponder, unplanned events could be seen and analyzed as they unfolded and in relation to the myriad planned events; commanders rapidly deployed resources based on real-time data.

All data was aggregated on a central SharePoint site where it was accessible and searchable by any of the 650 authorized users on the E-Sponder network. Commanders and managers in the Emergency Operations Center, the JSO main command post in downtown Jacksonville, viewed the data on scoreboard-sized projection screens. Learning the System Quickly, Seeing the Big Picture.

E-Sponder was deployed on January 3 and was adopted in just a few days by JSO and other law-enforcement personnel securing the event. Users required less than an hour of training on the system; familiarity with the Office program interface made learning E-Sponder easy.

E-Sponder provided a robust and secure portal for the exchange of real-time information about Super Bowl events and helped JSO coordinate security measures by the 53 participating public safety agencies. Everyone on the E-Sponder network was able to see what every other user was doing at the same moment, alleviating the need to coordinate personnel moves over assorted radio frequencies.

"This innovative solution helps us see a much larger picture," says Rutherford. "We gain agility, and our situational awareness is raised to a completely different dimension. Supervisors and analysts in our command center know where all our personnel are deployed and that they doing what they have been tasked to do. We are able to create and execute a transparent game plan with the ultimate goal of guaranteeing a safe and secure Super Bowl experience for everyone in Jacksonville."

Benefits
The new communications and collaboration solution provided the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office with the necessary tools to detect, prevent, and respond to acts that could jeopardize public safety, thereby enhancing security for Super Bowl XXXIX.

Enabling Information Workers, "E-Sponder really lends itself to quick flexibility and customization, and that's one of the main features we were looking for," says Beth Horn, Assistant Manager, IT Department, Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. "It also lends itself really well to cross-agency coordination because it requires so little training. But what I think is most valuable about this excellent technology is how it helps patrol officers move from the operational beat level to become skilled information workers. Heightened situational awareness rooted in real-time intelligence developed by adept information workers out in the field--that's what homeland security is all about."

Although E-Sponder's key functionality is related to critical security processes, the system also enabled the JSO IT group to automate many administrative tasks that were previously done manually. Overall planning and event staffing was done using Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003, as much of the preliminary planning had been, and E-Sponder became the repository of payroll and overtime reporting data, both recorded in InfoPath forms. Commanders and officers generated numerous automated situation reports in Microsoft Office Access 2003.

Increasing Efficiency and Productivity JSO credits much of its success in planning, communicating, and collaborating on the execution of a complex security program for Super Bowl XXXIX to E-Sponder and the Microsoft Office System. The benefits noted by the JSO include:

• Centralized command functions to support a unified command structure, coordinate efforts with multiple agencies, and avoid duplication of efforts
• Real-time communications enabling heightened situational awareness and faster response time and resolution of incidents
• Web-based capability to track both planned and unplanned events and to collaborate and share documents, forms, calendars, and contacts
• Customized forms to capture data for planning and execution of operations and indexed and searchable document library for integrated operations and archival purposes
• Replacing paper-based processes and improved archiving of information in one place for enterprise knowledge retention
• Reduction of required personnel for operations and administration

E-Sponder met JSO's need for a solution that could be implemented quickly and did not require extensive training for its many users. "E-Sponder's purpose is to provide key information to the command staff and exceptional situational awareness to the professionals in the field who are charged with protecting us," says Robert Wolf, Chief Executive Officer, Convergence Communications. "The officers in Jacksonville know how to do their jobs, and they know how to do them well. We hope that this technology allows them to do their jobs just a little bit better and maybe a little bit easier. Where in the past they may have had tons of paper and three-ring binders and maps to keep track of, now we empower them to get that information quicker and manage it better and more effectively."

"All the end users know Microsoft Office, so SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is an obvious choice for the foundation of E-Sponder," Wolf adds. "By using the .NET Framework, we were able to build the desired functionality and provide the kind of complex solution that typically requires large IT departments to build and maintain."

Microsoft Office System Improves the Business of Safety For previous Super Bowls, post-event "after-action" analysis to understand where planning fell short required digging through reams of paper in the hope that patterns would be uncovered. Reports on the many "unplanned events" that occurred could be spotty or incomplete, even when documenting an incident of potentially great consequence such as a bomb threat.

With the accumulated Incident Action Plans captured in InfoPath information gathering program, all the data contained in them was available for after-action analysis of the JSO Super Bowl event planning and operations execution. Microsoft Windows(R) SharePoint Services allowed the forms to be searched and catalogued in a forms library. This legacy is certain to prove invaluable to law enforcement agencies in Detroit, Michigan, where Super Bowl XL will be held in 2006, and to other public safety professionals studying effective homeland security in the post-September 11 era.

"What's exciting to me as a veteran law enforcement officer who is interested in innovation and technology is to see the police, fire, emergency medical, and public safety community begin to embrace technology as a way to make the public safer," says Russell. "The new collaboration solution helps make us more effective, informed, and able to carry out our mission more capably and more efficiently. It changes the way that we've been operating and really improves the processes on which policing has relied up to now. We're right on the bubble of a paradigm shift, following the business community in its use of technology, with technology now taking a leading role in the advancement of law enforcement best practices."

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