Funding’s up but so are resilience challenges
Months away from another financial year, there’s already speculation that government funding will set records. Gartner, for instance, is forecasting that public sector IT spending is set to grow by almost nine per cent in Australia. Of that, software spending is projected to grow by double digits. These projected increases might seem like a lot, but so are resilience challenges. How then should governments prioritise funding for emergency management?
New frameworks for addressing escalating resilience challenges
Well, government leaders must fully embrace an “all-hazards” approach to managing risks holistically, rather than individually.
Australia, for example, recently revised its Government Crisis Management Framework (AGCMF) along these lines. The updated Framework endorsed a seven-phase continuum for disaster management and recovery. The phases themselves include:
- Prevention
- Preparedness
- Response
- Relief
- Recovery
- Reconstruction
- Risk reduction
In the context of crisis planning and exercising, the AGCMF is meant to be implemented through a series of national-level crisis plans, each detailing its respective preparation, response, and recovery phases.
Maintained by the relevant Australian Government agencies, the plans will consider natural, human-made, and multi-faceted hazards. They will also reflect the roles and responsibilities set out in the AGCMF.
Tools and strategies to meet our resilience challenges
Of course, crisis plans are one thing. Even the most forward-thinking will require appropriate tools and strategies to be implemented then properly activated in moments of crisis.
Governments, here, must step in, investing heavily in resilience-enhancing, critical event and emergency management technologies.
What’s wrong with the legacy tools governments already have? According to practitioners, those tools, having long been too focused on individual emergency risk, are simply not up to the task of implementing an all-hazards approach.
Digital access to best practice key to meeting resilience challenges
What’s more, many of the platforms in question haven’t kept up with the latest trends in emergency management for government, such as access to best practice.
As a result, they fail to operationalise best practices in digital form, so that practitioners logging into an emergency operations centre (physical or virtual) can get a clear understanding of what’s going on and what they need to do in their role.
That won’t cut it in our age of increased resilience challenges.
What will? Digital platforms that are designed to support a variety of EOC structures, be they best-practice ICS Incident Command System or Australasian Inter-Service Incident Management System (AIIMS) structures, BAU structures, or customised structures that don’t follow ICS or AIIMS at all.
That’s not all. Best-practice libraries of incident response plans and checklists must be included in software subscriptions, too. They will enable government entities to create crisis strategies and action plans easily for different types of events.
Innovative solutions, such as Noggin’s very own integrated security, safety, and critical event management platform, should also keep up with the escalating risk to key assets, assessing those risks in advance and monitoring critical facilities throughout the emergency response process.
Finally, government expenditures might be on the upswing. But they must keep pace with a deteriorating threat environment, which includes emerging subvariants, geopolitical conflict, frosty trade relations, cyber threats on critical assets, supply chain disruptions, rising inflation, natural disasters, and more.
Fortunately, communities of best practice can help with updated guidance. Advanced critical event management platforms, in their turn, are providing access to that updated guidance as part of the subscription.
Not quite convinced? Demo Noggin’s critical event management capabilities for yourself.
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