Wherever you turn, everyone’s got their hands full responding to concurrent crises, ranging from ongoing COVID risk and natural disasters to war in eastern Europe, supply chain disruptions, and staffing shortages. Unfortunately, these threats all require major mobilizations, which deplete limited emergency resources. What emergency management technology innovations can help make up the difference, while preparing organizations and communities for the eroding threat environment?
The rise of concurrent, compounding, and consecutive crises requires emergency management technology innovation
The fact is this threat environment demands quicker decision-making from responding agencies and their partners in civil society.
Stakeholders will also have to adopt an “all hazards” approach to managing the concurrent disaster threat. Here, serious technology upgrades will be needed to support the augmented collaboration, communication, and data-sharing requirements that such a policy switch entails.
How to go about it?
Well, one of the more important emergency management technology innovations to consider is mobile critical event management command, including virtual EOCs that are mobile first, i.e., optimized for mobile users with dashboards resizing for mobile devices, making all the same tools available on the go.
Why’s it so important?
No longer can we rely on meeting face-to-face in moments of disasters. As a result, tools must be available to facilitate command (from anywhere), as well as clarify appropriate duties, education, training, license currency, and equipment for relevant roles.
Mobile critical event command comes in handy, here, because it gives emergency personnel a head start on activating response plans when disaster strikes, with role responsibilities for Incident Command System positions, action plans, and the like.
Management system shifts to enable quicker deployment of emergency management technology innovation
The systems that mobile command structures run on are just as important.
Specifically, self-improving management systems that come equipped with workflows can support key emergency response tasks, expediting emergency management technology innovation.
The point is to keep staff focused on the response, instead of paperwork. The workflows that can facilitate improved response include:
- Escalating emergency warning to incidents and tracking incidents through their entire lifecycle
- Automatically alerting stakeholders through helpful message templates
- Creating Incident Action Plans
- Requesting and tracking resources, as well as assigning tasks
- Capturing relevant information through forms tailored to specific roles
- Mapping incidents, resources, assets, and critical infrastructure
- Assessing Community Lifelines to ensure stability of lifesaving public services
What else matters?
Stakeholders need to get access to improved emergency management technology innovations before the next disaster strikes.
However, emergency management technology deployments typically entail lengthy implementation cycles. Besides further diverting scarce resources away from the field, these implementations fail to deliver upgrades in a timely manner.
Platforms that let agencies and partners build their own interfaces can be the solution. Indeed, low- and no-code platforms help stakeholders customize their solution to organizational requirements and risk patterns.
The platforms themselves use drag-and-drop capabilities to enable stakeholders to make mid-incident configurations, quickly creating new data models for any kind of information desired and presenting that data in a friendly way for users.
Workflow builders then tie everything together, helping agencies and partners plan out new business processes for what should happen when different triggers occur and using automation to accelerate the response.
Finally, keeping constituents safe will now require stakeholders to reinvigorate the critical event management technology they deploy. Solutions, such as Noggin, can provide all the tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS, and other national standards.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Test out Noggin for yourself.