Award honors his thought leadership and vision in leading the public safety and justice communities into the future.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Mission Critical Partners (MCP) announced today that Kevin Murray, the firm’s cofounder and executive chairman, was selected to receive a 911 Honor Award from the NG911 Institute, in the Industry Professional category. The NG911 Institute works to advance deployment of Next Generation 911 systems nationwide.
Murray was honored in part for his work to foster seamless data management and information exchange throughout and between the public safety and justice ecosystems. According to Murray, the amount of data that is being made available to public safety via broadband technologies is increasing by orders of magnitude, but a tsunami of raw information is unmanageable at best, overwhelming at worst.
“Data has been described as the oil of the 21st century, but raw data, like oil, has no utility
unless it can be harnessed and refined effectively,” Murray says. “In the public safety and justice communities, this means the ability to exchange data seamlessly, and to analyze and contextualize it so that it is actionable.”
MCP, guided by Kevin’s leadership, is doing the following in this regard:
- Helping public safety and justice agencies capture data effectively and efficiently; ensuring that it flows seamlessly between agencies, departments and their field personnel, and between disparate networks and systems;
- Helping agencies ensure that data is actionable, so that it can inform the decision- making process and be available to emergency responders whenever they need it.
- Helping agencies procure and implement solutions that enable them to integrate data into their daily operations.
- Helping agencies break down the longstanding silos that prevent seamless data-sharing between all elements of the ecosystem, through the use of automated workflows;
- Helping agencies interconnect disparate databases in a manner that enables automatic querying without any human component—to save time, reduce errors and eliminate the potential for data being lost or compromised.
To accomplish these goals, Murray led MCP’s initiative to develop three new solutions last year designed to enhance data integration, as follows:
- DataLinkTM Interface Solution—This solution enables secure, bidirectional data flow between two specific endpoints.
- DataSphereTM Integration Solution—This solution enables data exchange on a many- to-many basis—think of it as a compilation of many DataLink connections.
- DataScapeTM Analytics Solution—This platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology to make sense of unstructured data.
Murray also was recognized for a career in public safety that spans nearly a half century. He began as an emergency medical technician and later became a leading consultant to public- safety agencies nationwide. In 2009, he founded MCP and since then has built a firm that has provided advisory and information technology (IT), network and cybersecurity solutions to more than 1,500 agencies from coast to coast, with the sole purpose of helping those agencies improve emergency response outcomes. Earlier this year, Murray stepped back from his role as MCP’s chief executive officer and now serves as the firm’s executive chairman.