Government Success: Alabama Forestry Commission Modernizes Critical Wildfire Response Capabilities with HSO and Microsoft

The technology supporting some of AFC’s most critical wildfire response operations had become increasingly unreliable.

AFC’s legacy dispatch environment included a homegrown application with an aging .NET front end and SQL back end, supplemented by manual processes and spreadsheet-based tracking.

The system had experienced critical outages, including during active wildfire events. The seriousness of that risk became especially clear in spring 2025, when more than 200 wildfires were active across Alabama in a single day and the system went down.

For an organization responsible for responding to wildfires across roughly 90 percent of the state outside municipal jurisdictions, system reliability was not simply an IT issue. It could directly affect situational awareness, resource coordination, and firefighter safety. AFC knew it needed to modernize. The bigger question was how far that modernization could go.

Over time, AFC personnel had developed ways to operate around the limitations of their technology. Dispatchers could track incidents, distinguish between permitted burns and active wildfires, manually assign resources, and make phone calls to determine who was available and how long it might take them to reach an incident.

But many of those processes relied on manual updates and human coordination rather than a connected, real-time operational view. In some cases, the workarounds themselves had effectively become the process. AFC needed a partner it could trust with the modernization effort.

HSO was already a familiar partner within the State of Alabama. Building on successful work with the Alabama Department of Revenue and the Alabama Department of Mental Health, and with support from Microsoft, HSO was introduced to AFC as the agency began exploring how Power Platform could modernize its operations.

That existing track record helped establish trust quickly. But once HSO and AFC began working through the agency’s needs together, it became clear that the opportunity extended well beyond replacing an aging application.

Rather than beginning the engagement by asking AFC what it could afford to replace, HSO started with a different question: What do you actually need?

As HSO Senior Client Account Executive Alex Bartnesky explained, modernization is not simply about replacing technology. It is about identifying what an organization has been doing without—and determining whether long-standing limitations should still be accepted as inevitable.

HSO encouraged AFC personnel to step outside immediate budget assumptions and describe the operation they would build if they could design around their actual needs.

That changed the conversation. A meeting initially scheduled for 30 minutes became a two-and-a-half-hour working session.

HSO built the new environment on Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate, parts of the Microsoft Power Platform. The phased approach began with dispatch while establishing a foundation that could support additional modules and replace other legacy processes over time.

The new capabilities give AFC a more connected view of incidents, people, equipment, weather conditions, and operational activity. The platform integrates with systems including ArcGIS for mapping and reporting, Samsara for real-time equipment location, National Weather Service and Fire Environment Mapping System data for weather and fire conditions, and IRWIN for national wildfire tracking—replacing information that previously had to be gathered manually or was not available through integrated workflows.

Dispatch personnel can enter incidents and assign resources more efficiently. Real-time visualization, interactive mapping, and heatmaps improve situational awareness during periods of high wildfire activity. Existing databases provide personnel and resource information without forcing AFC to recreate systems that still serve a purpose.

A field application also allows personnel to report their daily availability and the status of assigned equipment such as trucks and bulldozers, creating a more current picture of what resources are actually ready for deployment.

The platform also extends beyond emergency response:

• A controlled-burn portal enables certified burn managers to submit permit requests electronically.

• Business rules can evaluate weather conditions and other parameters to help determine whether a burn is allowable, replacing a process that historically relied heavily on phone calls and manual entry.

• Interactive mapping allows users to identify burn locations and capture associated county and permit information directly within the application.

The current solution creates room for continued expansion, including additional permitting capabilities, public-facing wildfire information, deeper analytics, and other legacy process replacements. It also establishes something AFC did not previously have: a reliable repository of operational data.

That foundation could become increasingly important because the wildfire response system represents only one part of a much larger modernization need. Much of AFC’s broader technology environment was built on the same aging legacy platform, including core functions such as HR, grants management, and time and cost allocation. Those systems face many of the same reliability and maintainability challenges.

By moving toward an interconnected data foundation built on Dataverse and Power Platform, AFC now has a path to modernize those functions incrementally rather than replacing them with another collection of disconnected applications. Over time, that could create a more unified operational environment in which data, workflows, reporting, and future capabilities can work across the agency.

That matters as organizations increasingly explore AI. HSO deliberately did not make AI the centerpiece of this project. The more important first step was creating the connected data foundation AI would eventually need. As Alex said, without reliable information to draw from, AI has little meaningful foundation on which to operate.

For AFC, modernization therefore became more than replacing an aging dispatch application. It became an opportunity to rethink how a mission-critical state operation could work—and to build a platform capable of evolving along with it.

For other public-sector agencies facing aging systems, manual processes, and years of accumulated workarounds, the lesson may be equally important: The starting point for modernization does not have to be what needs to be replaced. It should start with asking the question, “What have we been doing without?”