The ACT ESA comprises of the ACT Ambulance Service, ACT Fire & Rescue, ACT Rural Fire Service, ACT State Emergency Service and the ESA Enabling Services. They are responsible for the ACT community’s first-call emergency response through these services.
The ACT ESA teamed up with Link Digital to build and upgrade their Single Point of Truth (SPOT) Application code base. Link Digital had supported the SPOT App for the last four years and was excited to be selected as the preferred supplier when it came time to upgrade the App.
The SPOT App is an online web application designed to send automated ESA news alerts to relevant departments, stakeholders and journalists. The App allows information to be sent out to a range of personnel with one click. Public Information Officers can log in, compose and publish news alerts to the ESA website, ESA Facebook account, ESA Twitter account and through email and SMS. This allows the community to be informed of warnings in near real-time.
During the 2019- 2020 bushfires, the App was used regularly to inform the ACT community about official information on severe fire warnings, including evacuations.
The App disseminated warnings with minimal delay, providing the ACT community with up-to-the-minute news updates.
Before the SPOT App, the alerts, posts, emails and updates were manually sent out, delaying the time for important news to reach the community. Now, everyone receives the same information at once.
After years of active usage, the App needed an upgrade to reduce the time required to publish each alert as most are time-critical. The main challenge was balancing publishing time with the accuracy of the alert to ensure there were no errors in the messages. ESA and Link Digital focused primarily on these issues and added features related to the publishing experience that make the publishing process simpler and quicker. We always designed solutions to minimise the risk of publishing incorrect or misleading information. And we believe we’ve achieved this with great success.
The App’s look and feel improved significantly to enhance the navigation within the App for its users. In addition, many helpful features like spell checking, autocompletes, and file management were added to support the publishing officers.
Another area of focus was a technical stack to ensure business continuity for the App for years. This has been achieved by picking a well-supported and universally adopted framework to ensure the application is always up-to-date and extended as new business requirements emerge.
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