Organizations today face a litany of challenges to resilience, with the popularity of the hybrid workforce fragmenting incident response, as well. What can be done to better absorb and adapt in a changing environment?
Upgrading emergency management platform capabilities will help. Read on to learn the five reasons why.
The need to prioritize organizational resilience
Crises have been growing in kind, cost, and severity for some time now. But as of recently, we’ve witnessed a trend toward consecutive, concurrent, and compounding crises.
And it’s this simultaneous accumulation and durability of critical events that’s forcing organizations to prioritize organizational resilience like never before. Case in point: this year alone, we’ve experienced the following disruptions:
- Long-lasting supply-chain interruptions in the Red Sea and Panama Canal
- Ongoing geopolitical conflict in eastern Europe and the Middle East, with escalating tensions in the western Pacific
- Persistent inflation
- Cyber attacks on important targets
- Critical infrastructure incidents
- Third-party incidents
- Severe weather events
The need to upgrade emergency management software capabilities
What of the software capabilities needed to handle these critical issues? Well, for the organizations that procured their emergency management platforms years ago, they’re now facing far more severe public safety risk.
As events themselves intensify, organizations must now ask themselves whether the tools purchased to manage the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery have kept up?
5 reasons to upgrade your emergency management platform
Not certain? Many organizations aren’t exactly sure what the precise reasons to upgrade their emergency management platforms are.
As a result, we’ve compiled a list, laying out the following five reasons to upgrade your emergency management platform today.
1. Improved communication
Accuracy and speed have always been necessary in an emergency. Naturally, accuracy and speed have become that much more important as emergencies have increased in kind and intensity.
To that end, platforms should enable streamlined communications with automated notifications via customizable workflows to respond more quickly and efficiently to disruptive events, reduce manual effort and human intervention, and ensure consistency and reliability in critical tasks and processes.
Not just streamlined but targeted, too. Platforms should enable teams to target communications to specific roles, teams, groups, locations, or any contact attribute, to ensure the right messages get to the right people at the right time and include links back to any object in the system in the message content.
2. Real-time notifications
To keep up with the risk picture, all aspects of emergency notification and messaging must become increasingly dynamic, as well. For instance, location-based messaging must allow organizations to easily identify personnel and assets in the vicinity of an event and trigger notifications to quickly get vital messages to them.
The management of these messages is just as important, too. Emergency management platforms should, therefore, enable teams to relate messages to events, assets, or other objects, to form part of a coherent record and include in timelines, use multiple system inboxes to receive email or SMS and organize messages by event, as well as apply message labels to easily categorize and find messages.
3. All-hazards incident management
Just as response teams must communicate faster, they must get into the field quicker and more efficiently, too.
Emergency management software, for its part, must streamline incident response using best-practice, all-hazard incident management standards from around the world, including AIIMS, NIMS / ICS, and JESIP.
4. Faster activation
Part of getting in the field faster is activating teams and plans quicker.
Emergency management software should help on this score, by deploying plans and checklists in an instant. The functionality, depending on the task at hand, should save time using pre-prepared tasks and checklists.
Emergency management functionality should also help synchronize and align emergency response efforts with team activation notifications, defined roles and responsibilities, and a centralized location to collaborate, share information, and record event critical information.
5. Enhanced situational awareness
The move to overlapping crises means that understanding of the threat environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors must likewise deepen. Enhanced situational awareness must therefore become a priority of any emergency management platform.
How to achieve it? A platform that serves as a single source of truth for data and information gathering will help to increase the situational awareness of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and responders alike.
Finally, organizations don’t just face more threats than ever, they face more diverse threats, too. Emergency management platforms, as a result, must provide an integrated approach to resilience beyond just crisis, incident, and emergency management.
What to consider? Software platforms like Noggin offer a new breed of integrated resilience functionality.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Request a demo to check out Noggin's software for Emergency Management for yourself.
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