With disasters on the rise, organizations can’t afford to rely on manual processes. They must, in fact, digitize their emergency and incident management protocols with technology that helps them gather and manage critical incident data.
But what factors should organizations consider when choosing software? We delve into it all in the following article.
Disasters on the rise
Indeed, emergencies, in particular climate-related emergencies, are on the rise. According to 2023 data from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), disaster events have shot up from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year around the globe in the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, a 2021 report compiled by the World Meteorological Organization attributes 50% of all disasters, 45% of all reported deaths, and 74% of all reported economic losses around the globe in the years 1970 to 2019 to weather, climate, and water hazards, with a cost totalling $3.6 trillion.
The role of digital technology in managing emergencies
Given the sharp uptick in disaster risk, organizations can’t rely on time-intensive processes for emergency preparation, response, or recovery efforts. These methods duplicate efforts, invite human error, and simply aren’t scalable or efficient enough to keep up with the frequency and severity of emergencies.
In consequence, many organizations in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors have turned to emergency management software which acts as a single source of truth for emergency managers, first responders, and other key personnel.
Besides enabling organizations to manage any incident, big or small, effectively through its entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, such solutions provide the benefit of keeping the whole incident management team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture.
Considerations when choosing emergency management software
Not all emergency management solutions are created equal, though. Organizations, whether they’ve fully digitized or not, are often on the look for the most robust capabilities with which to digitize their emergency and incident management protocols.
What are those capabilities, exactly? We’ve compiled a list of four feature considerations organizations should have when choosing emergency management software
1. Centralizes critical data management
The more emergency management teams know about a developing crisis, the better positioned they are to make informed decisions, prioritize focus, and execute responses. Emergency management software should, therefore, let organizations create a clear and accessible hub for critical data during an emergency, so that every team member has a single source of truth from which to understand the situation, collaborate on decision-making, and move quickly to execute their role.
2. Enhances situational awareness
Situational awareness is critical in any disaster situation. Emergency management software should facilitate enhanced situational awareness, by letting teams gather up-to-date critical emergency data in one central space. That increased accessibility will then help teams improve their response much more quickly than they could through scattered, less scalable manual processes.
3. Enables more effective communication
Emergency response command leads need the ability to control to where and how information flows, to ensure that the chain of command is preserved. That way all emergency response personnel are operating in unison. Emergency management software should help, here, by granting each team member personalized access to clear, bi-directional communication channels as they perform the roles conferred on them in the incident command structure.
4. Coordinates the emergency response
An emergency response is only as effective as the coordination of that response. Fortunately, emergency response software can help with consolidated coordination for the organized execution of emergency response action-items. For instance, certain digital incident management solutions allow every team member to understand their role, know how and when to respond, and where to ask questions and find their next task.
Finally, these four capabilities, while a start, don’t scratch the surface of what organizations should look out for in an emergency management solution.
But don’t worry, we go into deeper detail in our latest article, The Role of Emergency Incident Management Software in Operationalizing Your Incident Action Plan. Check it out to dig deeper.
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