In 2012 the SASES had a number of disparate incident information and management systems. Job receipt and dispatch was handled by a CAD system shared with the SA Fire agencies. Visibility of ongoing jobs was provided by one of two systems, the SACFS CRIIMSON system and the Incident Monitor system developed by two senior volunteers. Incident reporting was by paper form, sent in to State Headquarters and entered into an Access database. None of these systems were linked in any way and no data sharing was possible.

 The challenges for Incident Management in an SES context are somewhat different to those of a fire context in that a significant event, such as a severe storm, requires the management of a large number of concurrent individual tasks rather than a single high impact fire. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the geographic extent of the entire event can be considerable, even statewide. However, the vast majority of these tasks are, whilst distressing to the individuals impacted, not particularly serious or life threatening. The reality of such events is that initial response resources are rapidly overwhelmed. Tasks must be triaged and prioritized by the Incident Management Team and incoming resources tasked appropriately as they become available. None of the systems available to SASES had been developed to facilitate this requirement.

 In addition, the lack of any data interchange between the systems made accurate reporting of response data very difficult at best, and impossible for the structured format required for input to AIRSNAT.

 The decision was made, therefore, to develop a single, integrated incident and information management system, called SESIIMS (State Emergency Service Incident and Information Management System). This presentation will describe the challenges faced, and solutions designed, during the development of SESIIMS to address the issues described above.