Emergency services across Australia have an enviable reputation for pursuing a high level of professional mastery. Indeed, it is this quality among others that results in fire and ambulance services, together with other emergency management partners, routinely being voted the country’s most trusted profession(s). Yet in today’s environment, achieving and maintaining contemporary and relevant expertise is not a simple task.

Training, competency maintenance, personnel retention and many other stressors play a critical part in influencing an agency’s success criteria. Historically, these areas have been mitigated through a narrow and deep investment in experience; where the membership of an agency by a practitioner will span an entire career. However, as the environment rapidly changes, so does the workforce and the mediums in which it communicates. It follows that ‘traditional’ methods of knowledge maintenance – word-of-mouth instruction, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and a relatively small policy basis – are no longer sufficient. As agencies embark on an endless quest for information and compliance, it is clear that a new approach to knowledge management is needed. And in March 2014, the Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) commenced this journey accordingly.

The TFS Knowledge Management Project consists of two distinct but mutually supporting parts. Firstly, the TFS Policy Framework exists to incorporate agency policies, administrative and governance documents applicable to the entire workforce. Alternatively, the TFS Doctrine Model maintains the purely operational methods, procedures and guidelines. Collectively, these systems deliver a synchronised, contemporary reference library where best-practice knowledge management principles are utilised.

Throughout 2014/15, the TFS doctrine project was identified as the main effort. In the TFS context, doctrine is a term applied to operational methods and procedures – e.g. those documents traditionally referred to as standard operating procedures, standard operating guidelines and/or operational instructions.