Crises, emergencies, and events are a fact of life – inevitable. But preparatory measures go a long way to ensuring overall organizational resilience. One such measure is building an incident management system or IMS.
What’s an IMS? In the following, we answer what an IMS is as well as lay out incident management measures you should deploy today.
Defining an Incident Management System (IMS)
Well, an incident management system itself is a structured system or plan designed to minimize organizational disruption, maintain operational continuity, and protect your employees and assets when an incident occurs.
Typically, an IMS will contain clear instructions for how internal teams should develop situational awareness, restore normal operations, and communicate amongst themselves and outside stakeholders.
Benefits of having an Incident Management System
Why have an IMS in place in the first place, though? That’s a good question.
Responding to incidents, especially larger-scale incidents, requires effective decision making – and not just making one decision, either. A given incident will generate any number of tasks; performing those tasks, in turn, entails prioritization, delineating responsibilities, and then providing updates to stakeholders, such as the public.
An incident management system gives structure and standardization to that end-to-end incident management lifecycle. It serves to enhance situational awareness leading to more informed decision making. And those decisions can limit damage and mitigate risk, making recovery less costly to the organization.
Enhanced situational awareness isn’t the only benefit of having an IMS in place, either. Oftentimes, jurisdictions mandate that certain entities maintain an incident management system as well as an incident action plan.
Example of an Incident Management System
All sounds pretty theoretical; so, what are some real-life examples of an IMS? In the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security introduced the National Incident Management System (NIMS) in 2004.
Why was NIMS developed? Well, when incidents occur, private-sector organizations have a definitive role to play. Without NIMS, though, those organizations, particularly those with access to critical infrastructure and services, didn’t have a structured way to effectively deliver potentially lifesaving assistance.
The government also had a vested interest in establishing more effective protocols to partner with private-sector actors during large-scale, multijurisdictional incident response efforts.
So, what’s NIMS, exactly?
At its heart NIMS, emerging out of the Incident Command System (ICS), is a standardized framework for incident management response, including flexible and responsive protocols for any incident, irrespective of scope, magnitude, or location.
Part of that framework includes a common vocabulary for incident response, as well, which makes it easier to coordinate with government organizations at all levels, as that vocabulary and framework rest on the following principles:
Preparedness
Planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action to achieve and maintain readiness to respond.
Communications and information management
Compiling data from across sources to create a common operating picture (COP), so the incident commander or unified command can make consistent, effective, and timely decisions, and share them with all respondents to ensure uniform situational awareness when conducting operations.
Resource management
The coordination, oversight, and processes necessary to provide appropriate resources in a timely fashion during incident response.
Command and management
Enabling effective and efficient incident management and coordination by providing a flexible, standardized structure.
Ongoing management and maintenance
Keeping all other components at full readiness and making adjustments to each when improvements are available.
Now, what happens when an incident is of significant enough magnitude that it results in organizational disruption and/or property or asset damage? That’s when the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) gets activated thanks to emergency management software. To learn more about EOC operations and management as well as how EOCs conform with incident management systems like NIMS, check out our Introductory Guide to Emergency Operations Centers.
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