In recent times, critical events have grown in kind, cost, and severity. The pandemic lingers on into late 2021, creating knock-on supply chain crises. Meanwhile, natural disasters grow more numerous and expensive by the year.
What’s behind the need for proactive critical event management
A confluence of forces, including the pandemic, related disturbances, escalating climate disasters affecting economic infrastructure, and cybersecurity events, as well as other digital disruptions, is creating the need for proactive critical event management solutions.
Critical event management solutions are software and related services designed to manage an institution’s preparation, response, and recovery relating to events that impact continuity, operations, and safety.
Besides multi-dimensional events or “all hazards,” these solutions also address small and large-impact events alike. The rationale: many organisations prefer using the same tools to manage more routine, smaller events, as those they use for larger-impact events.
Core components of critical event management solutions
And a growing technology market addresses this use case. According to an independent research advisory firm, the market comprises “software and related services designed to enable organisation-wide, cross-functional response to critical events, using a combination of incident management, emergency communications, and proactive risk intelligence.”
This comes from a convergence of technology and vendor markets, including communications, incident response, and case management.
So, what specific capabilities can organisations find to manage critical events? Core components of critical event management solutions can consist of the following:
- Emergency mass notification tools for targeted communications. This solution-set enables effective crisis and emergency communications to impacted individuals and response teams. As such, it offers the benefit of both increasing response efficiency and reducing the risk personnel faces during critical events.
- Employee-tracking to maintain duty of care. Of increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, this mobile solution-set enables the identification of threats to relevant personnel wherever they are. What’s more, personnel can leverage these capabilities if they themselves feel threatened or during critical events to alert employers of their status.
- Incident management to improve the efficiency of emergency response. The function of this solution set is to serve as centralised hubs, or virtual emergency operations centres, to process incoming situational and risk data and manage the response effort. As such, these capabilities offer response teams an in-depth view into critical events.
What’s new in the critical event management market
Of course, developments in proactive critical event management aren’t happening in a silo. Technology trends are entering critical event and emergency management from the larger world of digital innovation.
Interfaces and experiences, business enablers, and productivity revolution are some of the overarching themes that have emerged in technology today. Each has made a significant impact on proactive critical event management.
As a result, technology customers are turning their backs on single-use, or point, solutions, whether for communications, collaboration, or information capture.
They find it difficult to get business cases approved for such solutions and have instead been looking for management systems and multiple use case solutions to ensure continuous improvement.
One of the critical event management systems recognised in this space is Noggin. To see what capabilities Noggin has to offer your organisation, request a demo today.