Tim Needham

West Midlands Fire Service's ICT team will be showcasing the next generation of their award-winning workflow software at this year’s Emergency Services Show. They’ve developed the ‘Tymly’ platform to meet the increasingly complex data challenges facing today’s emergency services. For any organization, having the ability to access relevant, accurate and timely data from any location is important. In an emergency context it can also often be life-critical. Instead of thinking in terms of separately procured computer systems, Tymly offers a single app from which any employee can search and maintain the data they need from day to day. From streaming live incident data and our response vehicles’ positions, through to admin tasks, Tymly can securely orchestrate any workflow via any modern device. centralized access control It is already supporting our fire safety work, ‘Safe and Well’ visits to people’s homes, ‘Safe and Strong’ work with businesses and the management of mapping and address information used in our fire control. Tim Needham, Software Architect with WMFS, said: “The ‘one app for anything’ tactic brings many organizational efficiencies – for example fewer training needs, centralized access control, mobile working and simpler procurement and IT overheads.” But, he added, the disruptive power of Tymly comes from the innovative way its workflows are built. Tymly uses blueprints to assemble digital services and route them to the appropriate teams “Tymly is often described as ‘digital Lego’. From a relatively small set of brick types, we can build a huge variety of digital services. And, as with toy building bricks, easy-to-understand plans help to transform these digital blocks into something much more exciting. In Tymly, the plans are known as ‘blueprints’.” Tymly uses the blueprints to automatically assemble digital services and route them to the appropriate teams. risk-based fire safety inspection Organizations are free to develop their own blueprints to deliver local initiatives, or can quickly tailor an existing one to their own needs – reducing duplication of effort, sharing best practice and gaining significant cost savings as they go. Blueprints have also proved to be a great accompaniment to open data products. Tim explained: “A correlation between premises’ low food hygiene standards and poor fire safety was identified. A Tymly blueprint was quickly written, which loads the Food Standards Agency’s ‘Scores on the Doors’ open data set into a risk-based fire safety inspection schedule.” The system is currently being rolled-out to teams within our organization, and there are plans to add Incident Reporting and Incident Command blueprints. But blueprints needn’t be confined to the fire and rescue sector. “Tymly uses cutting-edge web technology and modern software development practices,” said Tim. industry-leading authentication services “We’ve worked with top-tier suppliers, used industry-leading authentication services and, in line with Government best practice, built ‘in the open’ on the world’s largest code-collaboration platform. This means our code is freely available to download and use but, more significantly, it allows other organizations and suppliers to evolve Tymly as an open source project for the benefit of everyone.”