1. Overview
Asset Data & Information (ADI) provides data and information support around location
intelligence, analysis, and mapping / visualisation for emergency response management.
This critical information helps make sense of the high-level, common operating environment
during emergencies:
 location and type of incident
 damage to Sydney Water's assets (water, wastewater, and stormwater) and on
assets belonging to other utilities (electricity, gas, telecommunications)
 impact on the environment
 where to send crews to minimise service disruption, and importantly to keep crews
safe
 impact on customers who we need to keep informed about service disruptions and
what to expect, with timelines
These data-driven insights provide critical information for Emergency Response
Management - to understand and make sense of: 'What's happening where?' and 'What's
happening next?'.
This helps us plan and make decisions for least disruption of services to customers and
improves the customer experience.
Building a common operating environment
Acting on learnings from the October 2013 Blue Mountains bushfire emergency, ADI is
leading a project to identify business improvements for processes, people, information, and
technology.
We partnered as 'one team' across the business and with external agencies to 'create new
and better ways of doing things'. We're building capacity by enabling a common operating
environment with quick access to consolidated, up-to-date asset information across utilities.
Combined with the right tools and skills, this improves information intelligence for better
emergency response management.
Significant improvements to the way we operate during emergencies have been made
possible by exchanging information with external agencies, and harnessing their innovation
and tools for efficiencies, insights and intelligence that improves planning and decision-
making across the end-to-end process:

2. New Tools Information about the tool
Spatial
Information and
Mapping System
(SIMS)
Provides easy access to a single, integrated view of all asset
information across utilities, as the authoritative repository and database.
This is the Emergency Information Coordination Unit's (EICU's)
decision support tool that helps emergency response planning. Sydney
Water integrated its asset data to SIMS. It helps understand: 'What's
happening where?' - to see the impact of the incident on customers,
assets, the environment, and crews?'
Common
Operating Picture
(COP)
Enables predictive analysis. Rural Fire Service (RFS) provided this for
our use. It helps understand: "What's happening next?"
In addition, Google Earth has now been added to the suite of tools available to help share
spatial information with stakeholders - expanding capabilities provided by our existing GIS
(Hydra) and MapInfo.
Project benefits and outcomes
New developments introduced from this project combine to build information, insights and
intelligence capability that improves planning and decision-making for better emergency
response management. ADI's enhanced capability to produce visualisation (maps or pdfs)
and use mapping symbology, has improved services, as demonstrated in the table below:
ADI Service offerings
Previous
capability
New, improved capability -
using mapping symbology
Search, locate, and identify incident eg
fire location (point)
- Example 2
Search, locate, and identify incident eg
burned area (fire polygon)
- Example 3
Produce a map or pdf of assets Example 1 Example 4
Produce a map or pdf of critical
customers
Example 1 Example 5
Search, locate, and identify crew
locations
- Example 6
Produce a map or pdf of crew locations - Example 6
Share data with other agencies -
Example 7, Example 8, Example
9

3. Working with you
ADI thanks the 21 people interviewed (pdf) who shared their requirements and information
across the end-to-end emergency response process:
 internal stakeholders: Business Strategy & Resilience, Customer Services, Service
Delivery, Liveable City Solutions
 external agencies: Emergency Information Coordination Unit (EICU); Energy &
Utility Services Functional Area Coordination (EUSFAC); Rural Fire Service (RFS)
These contributions helped shape the new business process that improves access to the
right information, quickly, during an emergency.
Read more about the Emergency Response Management project (pdf) that facilitated
business improvement changes across process, people, information, and technology /
applications.
What's next? We look forward to ongoing partnering with EICU to consolidate all
emergency incident information into SIMS eg fire, floods, traffic etc. This will enhance an
integrated view of latest available information, and further reduce double handling of data.
Who to contact
The Asset Data & Information (ADI) Duty Manager is the liaison point of contact between
ADI and the Risk & Resilience team. Nominated Duty Managers are:
Contacts
Amandeep Singh Luke Freeman
Content ID: ICONN_CDF_DD_066554
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