U.K. Fire Agency, telent Celebrate 19 Years of Collaboration
23rd Jan 2020
Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority (MRFA) and U.K. critical infrastructure firm telent are marking a milestone as their collaborative partnership enters its 19th year, with a contract secured until 2024.
Serving five metropolitan boroughs — Sefton, St Helens, Knowsley, Wirral and Liverpool — community safety and life-saving operations are top priorities for MFRA. Information, communications and technology (ICT) services are crucial to the daily operations and must be developed, aligned and continually reviewed to ensure they can support the delivery of the authority’s Integrated Risk Management Plan (IRMP), which prepares for various incidents and is a statutory requirement of all fire services.
Since 2001, telent has delivered a range of vital ICT services and introduced multiple innovations, including an information technology infrastructure library (ITIL)-based service catalog to ensure that Merseyside can easily alter the services it receives, according to changing needs. At the heart of the contract, telent runs a service desk for MFRA, handling more than 650 IT incidents per month, with 75% of issues fixed by telent remotely, bringing significant cost savings to Merseyside.
“Our relationship with telent means we have a partner that we can rely on in the most demanding of circumstances,” said Phil Garrigan, MFRA chief fire officer. “As well as having a deep understanding of the blue light sector, telent brings a flexible approach to its service delivery, which has proved invaluable to us as we work to keep up with the fast-paced technological changes across the business sphere. Ultimately, we know we have a highly trusted partner in telent and look forward to working with the team for years to come.”
More recently, telent made additions to the catalog, including ICT life-cycle management services for national resilience fire control (NRFC) and cloud-based services to deliver in-house apps on frontline appliances. The national resilience is responsible for deploying and coordinating national resilience equipment and supporting individual fire and rescue services to minimize the impact of major emergencies.
According to U.K. Home Office, MFRA attends more primary fires per thousand population than any other fire and rescue service in the U.K. It is committed to attending all life risk incidents within 10 minutes on 90% of occasions.
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