FDNY Officers' Course Up For Harvard Award

By ARI PAUL

The Fire Department's Officers Management Institute has been named a semi-finalist for Harvard University's Ash Institute Award for best innovations in government, and is in the running to win a $100,000 award in September.

NICHOLAS SCOPPETTA: Develop non-fire expertise.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta instituted the mandatory six-week program for senior officers in conjunction with Columbia University in the fall of 2002 as a way to train fire and Emergency Medical Service chiefs in the management aspects of the department.

Building on Skills

"Our people from top to bottom are the best in the country at responding to emergencies and doing things that fire departments traditionally do," he said last week. "On the other hand, today we need much more than that. They have to concern themselves with new initiatives, understand the budgeting process, what it takes to obtain the resources for new initiatives and set the priorities that need to be set. This Fire Officers Management Institute is part and parcel of a whole review of how the department is managed."

In addition to having Columbia faculty members and department leaders teach classes on management, employees from the Office of Management and Budget offer classes on understanding the budget process. Officers participate in a mock City Council meeting where they have to respond to questioning. Chief FDNY spokesman Francis X. Gribbon teaches officers how to interview with reporters.

The Commissioner said that while he knew of no other fire department in the nation that had such a program, he said that FOMI was based on similar educational programs for officers in other city agencies.

'Better Response Time'

Mr. Scoppetta believed the recognition from Harvard was a mark of the program's success, and added that one of the most notable improvements he has seen in the department as a result of the FOMI was in the reduction of response times, which he said were disappointingly high in 2005.

"We developed a great deal of data on response times, but put it in a very accessible form," he said. "There is a computer program now that is on every computer. The senior people, because they've been through FOMI, understand, one, the importance of managing with data and, two, how to go about that and make accountability decisions because you have the data, and you're not relying on anecdotal evidence. This is a whole change in the culture here."

The Commissioner added, "What I'm trying to leave behind is a culture of managing by this specific information."