7 Critical Event Management Software Capabilities You Need to Upgrade Today

Introduction

Crises have been growing in kind, cost, and severity for some time now. But only in the last few years has it become acceptable to describe the present moment of consecutive, concurrent, and compounding crises as polycrisis.

What is polycrisis? Columbia University Professor, Adam Tooze defines the term as “this coming together at a single moment of things which, on the face of it, don't have anything to do with each other, but seem to pile onto each other to create a situation in the minds of policymakers, business people, families, individuals.”

And it’s this simultaneous accumulation and durability of critical events that’s forcing businesses to prioritize organizational resilience like never before.

Prioritizing organizational resilience in the age of polycrisis

Indeed, businesses today face a litany of challenges to organizational resilience, the ability to absorb and adapt in a changing environment. This year alone, we’ve experienced the following disruptions:

• Long-lasting supply-chain interruptions in the Red Sea and Panama Canal
• Ongoing geopolitical conflict in eastern Europe and the Middle East, with escalating tensions in the western Pacific
• Persistent inflation
• Cyber attacks on important targets
• Critical infrastructure incidents
• Third-party incidents
• Severe weather events

Beyond these high-profile incidents, businesses continue to incur operational risk from their complex business processes as well as health and safety risk from potential worker accidents, injuries, and illnesses.

Add to it all, the popularity of the hybrid workforce – estimates suggest that remote work remains three to four times more prevalent than it was in 2019ⁱ – means that incident response is itself distributed.

The need to upgrade critical event management software capabilities

What of the software capabilities needed to handle both critical issues and less impactful events? Well, for the businesses that procured their critical event management platforms years ago, they’re now facing far more severe and wide-ranging business risk.

As events intensify, businesses must now ask themselves whether the tools purchased to manage their company’s preparation, response, and recovery from incidents that impact continuity, operations, and safety have kept up?  

If the answer is no, now is the time to upgrade critical event management capabilities.

Critical event management software capabilities

Which ones, exactly, though?

Based on changes in the risk environment and technology market, we’ve compiled a list of seven critical event management (CEM) software capabilities businesses need to upgrade today:

1. Crisis communication

Accuracy and speed have always been necessary in a crisis. Naturally, accuracy and speed have become that much more important as crises have increased in kind and intensity.

It’s now crucial that platforms come equipped with crisis communication templates and powerful workflow builders that enable responders to pre-stage messages and tasks.

To that end, CEM platforms should enable streamlined communications with automated notifications via customizable workflows to respond more quickly and efficiently to disruptive events, reduce manual effort and human intervention, and ensure consistency and reliability in critical tasks and processes.

Not just streamlined but targeted, too. CEM platforms should enable teams to target communications to specific roles, teams, groups, locations, or any contact attribute, to ensure the right messages get to the right people at the right time and include links back to any object in the system in the message content.

That’s not all. Crisis communications functionality should also make it easy to work in real-time with the response team, better coordinate the response, and keep everyone informed.

What features can facilitate? Consider built-in communication and collaboration tools like

chat, email, SMS, voice, and app push messages.

2. Emergency notifications

To keep up with the risk picture, all aspects of emergency notification and messaging must become increasingly dynamic, as well. For instance, location-based messaging must allow organizations to easily identify personnel and assets in the vicinity of an event and trigger notifications to quickly get vital messages to them.

The management of these messages is just as important. CEM platforms should enable teams to relate messages to events, assets, or other objects, to form part of a coherent record and include in timelines, use multiple system inboxes to receive email or SMS and organize messages by event, as well as apply message labels to easily categorize and find messages.

On the message response front, users should be able to receive and action email and SMS replies and capture responses by incorporating response links in email or SMS messages as well as audible response prompts in voice messages.

That’s not all. Teams should be able to use these responses to conduct welfare checks or team activations.

3. All-hazards incident management

Just as response teams must communicate faster, they must get into the field quicker and more efficiently, too.

CEM software, for its part, must streamline incident response using best-practice, all-hazard incident management standards from around the world, including AIIMS, NIMS / ICS, and JESIP.

4. Team activation, roles & collaboration

Part of getting in the field faster is activating teams and plans quicker.

Critical event management software should help by deploying plans and checklists in an instant. The functionality, depending on the task at hand, should save time using pre-prepared tasks and checklists.

CEM functionality should also help synchronize and align emergency response efforts with team activation notifications, defined roles and responsibilities, and a centralized location to collaborate, share information, and record event critical information.

5. Situational awareness

The move to overlapping crises means that understanding of the threat environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors must likewise deepen. Enhanced situational awareness must therefore become a priority of any critical event management platform.

How to achieve it? A platform that serves as a single source of truth for data and information gathering will help to increase the situational awareness of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and responders alike.

How? Updated functionality will enable the EOC to receive updates directly from responders or the public through simple data collection methods, including public forms and offline forms.

Creating a common operating picture is also vital to maintaining situational awareness. Capabilities to consider here include field personnel updates, GIS feeds, data import, email, and social media.

Critical event management platforms should also give organizations the ability to display critical information on comprehensive dashboards and incorporate external data feeds from across the web.

6. Mapping

Visualizing where things are in time and space also plays a crucial role in facilitating situational awareness. But not all mapping capabilities will do.

Nowadays, organizations require advanced mapping capabilities to provide help in coordinating logistics, optimizing resource distribution, and minimizing response time.

What’s a feature to consider? Consider the ability to incorporate Esri ArcGIS, WMS, KML, GeoJSON, or other sources to view asset locations in the context of weather threats and critical infrastructure protection.

7. EOC management

Centralized emergency management still matters when disaster strikes. And as disasters become more prolific and complex, EOC management tools specifically must improve.

To that end, critical event management functionality must enable organizations to stand up their EOCs at the local, regional, state, and national levels.

Software must also come with the capability to wrap up multiple, related local incidents into a single regional one as well as provide interfaces fully tailored to the role and level of the user.

An integrated approach to resilience

Finally, businesses don’t just face more threats than ever, they face more diverse threats, as well. CEM platforms, as a result, must provide an integrated approach to resilience beyond just crisis, incident, and emergency management.

What to consider? Platforms like Noggin offer a new breed of integrated resilience workspace.

They also offer powerful automation to streamline and simplify resilience processes, flexible, drag-and-drop functionality for easy customization to reflect an organization’s unique risk level, and out-of-the-box solution templates to ground resilience management in international best practice.

The best part, though: seamlessly unifying operational risk management, business continuity planning & testing, operational resilience, incident, crisis & emergency management, and security & safety operations, these integrated resilience workspaces give organizations everything they need to anticipate and prepare to protect what matters, navigate disruptions with effective response & recovery, and strengthen resilience through continuous improvement. 

Sources

ⁱ Tim Smart, U.S. News: Remote Work Has Radically Changed the Economy – and it’s Here to Stay. Available at https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2024-01-25/remote-work-has-radically-changed-the-economy-and-its-here-to-stay.