Two things happened last week in my life as a Fire Captain that simply could not have happened a generation ago.

Guest post by Eric Tomlinson. Eric is a Deputy Chief with the Kent Regional Fire Authority in Washington State

Much has been said about the brotherhood of the American Fire Service. Put firefighters from neighboring departments together at a conference, watering hole, or other neutral ground and we will buy each other beverages and compare our Maltese tattoos until the wee hours, celebrating our brotherhood of public service. For some reason though, when we broach the subject of change to our practices or operations with our mutual aid neighbors, we suddenly become very tribal and defensive. After all, most of us were hired by a Fire Chief who told us that

You may know, but recently we did a scheduled upgrade of our database server.  I wanted to provide a technical background on our recent upgrade and explain what that means to you as an end user.  As technical lead for Tablet Command and understanding the dependence of technology in emergency services, we strive for 100% uptime.  The database upgrade prevented us from meeting this, but we are planning our future architecture to accommodate for database upgrade too.