New CIO for Vic emergency services agency

The Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) has appointed Glenn Page as its new IT chief following the promotion of its former CIO Deborah Weiss to COO in July.

Page brings to the role more than 25 years of experience in leadership positions within large ASX-listed firms, government agencies, manufacturing firms to agile online service providers.

Before working for AGL, Page held senior IT-related roles with Siemens, Sensis, PMP and IAG, as well as serving in the Australian Defence Force.

He joins the ESTA following his departure from his previous role as head of technology services role with utilities firm, AGL Energy after it underwent a restructure that involved the retiring of the CIO role.

During his five years at AGL Energy, Page directed the planning, implementation and support of new enterprise IT systems and services, including the implementation of the world’s first end-to-end SAP system for metering and data management, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

In his new role, Page will report directly to the ESTA CEO and will oversee the implementation of a data warehouse that will integrate information from across Victoria’s emergency services sector in a common data format to assist with emergency service provision throughout the state.

He will also be responsible for leading the automation of many back office processes, which have previously been manual and in many cases, inefficient. Processes being addressed cover areas such as payroll, finance, scheduling and learning, an ESTA spokesperson said.

Another major focus for Page will be oversight of the ongoing $15 million upgrade to ESTA’s new telephony system, following the signing of a seven-year contract with NEC in April to replace the current Triple Zero emergency and non-emergency telephone platform.

The Victorian agency is responsible for dispatching an average of one call every 13 seconds for the Country Fire Authority, Melbourne Fire Brigade, Victoria Police and State Emergency Services.

The technical design work for the telephony upgrade is nearly complete and preliminary work is underway for hardware delivery.

Page will be required to work with operators to bring their expertise in call-taking and dispatch to the design. More than 50 ESTA operators recently volunteered to assist with the project and they will be contributing throughout the life of the project.

The upgrade is expected to deliver several benefits including intelligent call prioritisation, automatic voice switching across Victoria’s State Emergency Communications Centres, greater integration between systems, and improved surge management (surge being a large number of unexpected calls in a short period of time).

The new platform will also improve resource efficiency, data capture and redundancy, and give ESTA the capability to incorporate multi-media channels in the future.

Upon his appointment, Page said: “I believe in a strong partnership approach with both the business customers, internal and external, as well as the service providers.

“My focus will be on building a strong and lasting relationship with our customers to ensure that we increase their effectiveness though the provision of more aligned and better performing services”.