Tennessee Emergency Communications Board Honored for Special Achievement

NASHVILLE – Esri, a world leader in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, presented the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board (TECB) with a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award June 29 at the company’s annual User Conference in San Diego, Calif. Selected from over 300,000 eligible candidates, TECB received the award for its innovative application of technology, data collection, geospatial information visualization, and leadership through GIS in the field of emergency communications. 

“The SAG Awards serve a great purpose,” said Esri founder and President Jack Dangermond. “A Special Achievement in GIS Award recognizes best practices for organizations implementing technology to change the world. Highlighting good work benefits the entire GIS community and that’s very valuable.”

TECB is a self-funded nine-member board located within the Tennessee Department of Commerce & Insurance. TECB was created to establish emergency communications for citizens across the state and assist emergency communications districts (ECDs) in the areas of management, operations, and accountability. 

TECB, in cooperation with the state’s 100 ECDs, and partners Comtech and True North, developed a unique, statewide, seamless map that will be used to support Next Generation 911(NG911) call routing and other functions. NG911 is an initiative aimed at updating the 9-1-1 infrastructure to improve emergency communication services in a growingly wireless mobile society.

In addition to NG911, the statewide map, containing more than 6 million address points, is provided to numerous government agencies to support their operations at no cost. 

“We’re honored to receive this award from ESRI and proud to serve Tennessee citizens,” said TECB Executive Director Curtis Sutton. “The task of combining map data from 100 districts and maintaining seamless information is monumental.  Now that it is established, the map data will serve as a foundation for future projects supporting public safety and government agencies.”

TECB was one of 167 organizations in fields such as agriculture, defense, transportation, non-profit, telecommunications, and state and local government to receive a SAG Award. Esri staff nominate thousands of candidates annually from around the world for consideration and company President Dangermond selects the finalists.

“SAG winners are diverse in their geographical representation by design,” Dangermond said. “We purposely focus on the different regions of the world because we’re looking for best practices of GIS in different cultures and different geographies.”

For more information on how the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board is innovating through the application of GIS, visit https://tn.gov/commerce/section/E911.