When an emergency occurs, every minute matters. Your organization had other plans for how to spend its time and focus its efforts, but now, you must prioritize an unexpected and rapidly developing crisis situation.
And to deal with such an incident efficiently and effectively before it worsens, you know there’s no time for panic, confusion, or disorganization.
This is when emergency incident management software proves it’s such a vital part of your incident management capability.
Emergency incident management software — sometimes called emergency response planning software — is a suite of tools that helps you gather and manage critical incident data, acting as a single source of truth for emergency managers, first responders, and other key personnel. It creates a centralized space for communication, collaboration, and the sharing of incident action plans, so everyone can stay informed and aligned during an emergency response.
Let’s get into why today’s global risk landscape makes emergency incident management software so necessary, the operational benefits of emergency incident management software, and what to consider when sourcing it for your organization.
The need for emergency incident management software to operationalize your incident action plan
As the average number of emergency incidents continues to rise every year, particularly large-scale emergencies attributable to extreme weather activity, the likelihood that your organization will be adversely affected by such an emergency rises with it.
When combined with the upward trends for attributes of those same incidents — specifically, their frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing — it’s not only more likely that each emergency will do more damage, and therefore cost more to resolve, but also that your organization will still be working to resolve one incident when another one surfaces.
According to a 2021 report by the World Meteorological Organization, the number of disasters attributed to weather, climate, and water-related hazards increased by a factor of five between 1970 and 2019. While death tolls during the same period fell from over 50 thousand deaths in the 1970s to fewer than 20 thousand in the 2010s, the economic losses due to weather, climate, and water extremes have increased by a factor of seven.
The report also attributes 50% of all disasters, 45% of all reported deaths, and 74% of all reported economic losses to weather, climate, and water hazards, with a cost totalling $3.6 trillion USD across the same time period. Financial losses from downtime due to disasters vary based on your organization’s size, industry, and business model, but the latest data estimates average losses of $5,600 per minute, with up to $9,000 per minute for enterprise companies.
The aggregate destructive power of these disasters is simply staggering. And while technology has helped us improve our ability to predict certain types of disasters, such as hurricanes and typhoons, they can’t be prevented, only dealt with as they occur.
For your organization to maintain the strongest possible organizational resilience posture, it’s more necessary than ever for your disaster management solutions to help you to efficiently and effectively manage emergency incidents as they happen. This way, you can minimize their damaging effects, mitigate future risk, and quickly prepare for the next one.
Simply put, your organization can no longer rely on manual processes for emergency preparation, response, or recovery efforts. These methods require the recreation of efforts, invite human error, and aren’t as scalable or efficient as you need to keep up with the frequency and severity of emergencies. This is why your incident action plan needs to include a digital incident management solution like emergency incident management software.
The benefits of emergency response planning software to operationalize your incident action plan
Digital incident management solutions tap into advanced technology to assist your organization’s coordination and response during emergencies and perform post-crisis analysis to improve your response to the next one.
Here are some of the advantages of incorporating emergency incident management software into your incident action program:
Centralized critical data management
In an emergency, information is the most important thing there is — and as a situation develops, the scope and magnitude of its effect on your organization change with it. The more your emergency management teams know about a developing crisis, the better positioned they are to make informed decisions, prioritize focus, and execute responses.
Emergency response planning software lets your organization 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.
Enhanced situational awareness
To give your emergency management teams the information they need to make the most informed response decisions at critical junctures, your incident action plan should include tools that optimize your response teams’ situational awareness. For reference, situational awareness is the ability to perceive, understand, and respond to a given situation, and is considered a critical emergency response metric for police, fire, and emergency medical personnel.
By gathering up-to-date critical emergency data in one central space, your organization’s emergency management teams will be able to improve their situational awareness, resulting in more data-driven decisions designed to respond to the situation as it develops. Additionally, the increased accessibility of a centralized data hub helps your teams improve this response metric much more quickly than they could through scattered, less scalable manual processes.
More effective communication
During a crisis, the ability for critical emergency data to flow where it’s needed relies on the dependability, usability, and accessibility and of the communication channels that carry it. Additionally, your emergency response command leads need the ability to control where and how information flows, to ensure that chain of command is preserved so that all emergency response personnel are operating in unison as one larger team.
Emergency response planning software grants each team member personalized access to clear, bi-directional communication channels as they perform their role in your incident action plan. Team leads also have permission controls to ensure that information gets to the places it needs to go in order to keep directives clear.
Coordinated emergency response
An emergency is underway. Your incident action plan has enabled clear communication channels delivering critical emergency data to a centralized hub, increasing situational awareness for better decision-making, and now, your collaborative response plan is ready. But your emergency response is only as effective as the coordination of your emergency response.
This is where the most important component of emergency response planning software kicks in — consolidated coordination for the organized execution of emergency response action-items. With a digital incident management solution, every team member understands their role, knows how and when to respond, and where to either ask questions or find their next task.
How to choose emergent incident command software to operationalize your incident action plan
There are a number of factors to think about when selecting which emergency incident management software will become your organization’s incident management solution. The efficiency of your emergency response teams and their ability to devise the best-fit incident action plan for the situation at hand, regardless of what type of emergency it is, rests on this important decision.
Consider emergency incident management software that lets you:
- Coordinate a swift and effective response to any incident, regardless of the types of danger, damage, or hazards involved
- Manage emergency assets and resources including credentials and certifications, ensuring you have the right resources ready to respond
- Keep connected during emergencies via email, SMS, voice message, push notifications, or within the platform itself
- Keep emergency response aligned with instant access to plans and checklists, delineating pre-prepared tasks to team members as they are needed
- Maintain comprehensive incident logs and timelines to keep visibility high and accountability present both during and after response
- Gather organized incident notes with ready-to-go forms and templates hosted in the cloud with nothing to install
- Optimize situational awareness with accessible, responsive interfaces that keep up-to-date information right where your response teams go for it
- Map the locations of critical infrastructure and their threat level from extreme weather by integrating Esri ArcGIS, WMS, KML, GeoJASON, or other sources
- Build Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs) at local, regional, state, and national levels, with customizable permissions for each user
During an emergency, the most important attributes of your incident action plan are its flexibility and adaptability.
Things are always moving, and fast. But if you build your emergency response protocol on a foundation of preparedness, connectivity, coordination, and responsiveness — and incorporate intuitive emergency incident management software like Noggin — you’ll be able to navigate even the most dire incidents with calm under pressure.
Request a demo of Noggin to see how incident and emergency management software can help.
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