An Introductory Guide to Critical Event Management: What you need to know to get started

Why critical event management now

In recent times, critical events, a catch-all term for disruptive incidents, have grown in kind, cost, and severity. The pandemic (alone) lingers well into late 2021, creating major supply chain disruptions and acute labour shortages. 

And that’s not all. As many as 87 per cent of organisations experienced at least one critical event (not including the pandemic) last year, according to analyst research. 

Meanwhile, natural disasters grow more numerous and expensive by the year; 2020 saw a record 50-billiondollar weather disasters, up for from previous high marks recorded in the 2010sⁱ. 

As such, a confluence of forces, including the pandemic, related disturbances, escalating climate disasters affecting economic infrastructure, and cybersecurity events, is creating the need for organisations to take proactive measures to protect themselves.

Top critical events 

• Supply chain disruption 
• IT failure of a business-critical system
• Utility outage
• Cyberattack 
• Theft of physical or intellectual property
• Natural disaster or extreme weather
• Epidemic
• Legislation and regulatory change
• Fire, explosion
• Macroeconomic developments
• Civil unrest

What is critical event management?

What can they do? Well, that’s where critical event management comes in. 

The cross-functional practice dedicated to managing an organisation’s preparation, response, and recovery from events that impact continuity, operations, and safety, critical event management intersects incident management, emergency response and communications, risk intelligence and management, as well as crisis management and business continuity.

Indeed, critical event management efficiently aligns inter-departmental (or agency) resources to respond to disruptive incidents. This work includes teaming up stakeholders from relevant business lines, improving inter-departmental (or multi-stakeholder) coordination and communication flows, integrating necessary processes, and post-hoc reporting and analysis.

The benefits of such an approach (over one siloed off in IT) are obvious. A critical event might spring up in one line of the business, but rarely does it stay put.

The damage tends to spill over – and spill over quickly. When that happens, individual departments are powerless to address the damage, even if those departments have invested heavily in advanced technologies. Most times, the operative systems (and the data they hold) will not interoperate across departments

Critical event management, on the other hand, helps organisations to anticipate and respond to these threats. Effective critical event management (specifically) enables effective, interdepartmental communication mechanisms, giving business leaders a dynamic, consolidated view of threats, automated functionality to assess and respond to those threats, as well as information capture capabilities for critical event reporting.

Other business benefits of critical event management include greater operational efficiency (from fewer system and process redundancies), reduced costs, and better situational awareness as well as response visibility. And, of course, the ultimate goal of effective critical event management: improving an organisation’s ability to keep its employees and customers safe and themselves in compliance with duty of care obligations and other compliance drivers. 

Benefits of effective critical event management 

• Improved communication and coordination
• Operational efficiency
• Better visibility and situational awareness
• Enhanced threat forecasting
• Leaves an audit trail
• Reduced costs

Challenges to effective critical event management

Sounds pretty great. Those benefits, however, don’t just materialise without intervention.

Indeed, numerous obstacles stand in the way of managing critical events, rendering effective critical event management all the more difficult. According to analystsⁱⁱ, those challenges include the following:

• Lack of 100 per cent reach
• System downtime
• Inability to measure the impact or size of the critical event
• Ineffective inter-departmental communication and coordination
• Lack of integration with key business systems
• Limited ability to respond quickly

In most cases, too, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has only made managing critical events more difficult. For one, workforces are more geographically fragmented than ever. 

UK data, for instance, shows that almost a third of businesses aren’t certain what proportion of their employees will be working remotely in the futureⁱⁱⁱ. 

Having fewer workers in the brick-and-mortar office might seem like a boon. But in most jurisdictions, the employer duty of care obligation remains operative wherever the employee works. Add to that, it’s often harder to protect employees working alone and/or in remote locations. Employers, as such, need more granular data as to where their employees are, to reduce the risk of events with severe continuity implications (e.g., COVID outbreaks).

What’s more, effective critical event management requires equally effective communications. However, workers today are inundated with messaging, with the on-lining and rapid uptake of corporate communications tools. That makes it harder for necessary emergency communications to break through, especially if they come over traditional channels, like email, that workers are becoming trained to block out. 

Another challenge comes in the form of stricter data privacy regulations. As analysts note, businesses can’t just do whatever they want with employee data. Most advanced economies now enforce data privacy regulations (or legislation) – with the largest economic union, the EU, having one of the strictest data privacy frameworks, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

Some jurisdictions have overlapping frameworks – not just supranational, but federal, state, and local, as well. That makes it harder for critical event practitioners to make effective use of employee data, including location and contact details, to ensure safety in the event of an emergency. 

And one of the starkest challenges of them all: siloed data sources (e.g., HR databases). Effective critical event response requires the efficient transmission of data – those data sources usually come from multiple systems over the course of a critical event, often of indeterminate length. 

Numerous siloes stand in the way, though, complicating the task of leveraging useful data across operations, to better inform the response. 

Not just critical event management, levels of organisational resilience not where they need to be

Organisations built up critical event management muscle memory as a result of addressing the COVID-19 crisis. Management, for one, became more attuned to the importance of organisational resilience, as relayed in the Future of Business Continuity Report.

That awareness, however, hasn’t trickled down to staff: 40 per cent of management teams are very aware of the role of resilience in their organisation compared to only 16 per cent of staff.

That’s not all. The pandemic has had wide ranging effects, from ongoing reductions or restrictions on public meetings or gatherings (including sports, clubs, theatres, community centres, restaurants, religious gatherings, etc.), restrictions on travel (regional, national, or international), to lingering restrictions on working arrangements. 

The rapid uptick in remote work, as mentioned, has brought with it resilience challenges. Remote workers do not have the same resilience measures applied as those in the office; for instance, only a third of remote workers have power and communications resilience considered in plans.

The pandemic has also increased the salience of staff wellbeing protocols as a means of organisational resilience. Businesses, here, have been slow to keep up, though. Staff wellbeing is only a consideration in half of organisations’ business continuity plans.

What’s more, fractured supply chains and related product shortages are also creating profound challenges to organisational resilience. These challenges include:

• Reduced human resource supply, including limited supply of full-time employees and availability of subcontractors or temporary employees
• Customer orders cancelled or not fulfilled 
• Interruption in getting supplies or materials, particularly those imported by air or land, including goods that go through international borders and customs
• Disruptions in other services such as telecommunications, financial/ banking, water, power, fuels, medicine, or the food supply

The need for critical event management solutions

What can be done to overcome these challenges? Here, critical event management solutions come in handy. These are software solutions and related services designed to manage an institution’s preparation, response, and recovery from events that impact continuity, operations, and safety. 

But not just high-impact events. Critical event management solutions can help organisations handle lower-impact events and critical issues, as well. That gives the organisations that procure these solutions an advantage; namely, they can use the same tools to manage routine, smaller issues as they do for larger impact events. 

Of course, basic benefits come from digitising critical event management strategies (including communications, incident response, and case management) in the first place – many organisations are still reliant on manual processes. 

So, what do some core components of critical event management solutions look like? Well, according to independent analysts^iv, they can look like the following:

• Emergency mass notification tools for targeted communications. Enables effective crisis and emergency communications to impacted individuals and response teams. Offers the benefit of both increasing response efficiency and reducing the risk personnel faces during critical events.
• Employee-tracking to maintain duty of care. Enables the identification of threats to relevant personnel wherever they are. 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. Serves as centralised hubs, or virtual emergency operations centres, to process incoming situational and risk data and manage the response effort. Offers response teams an in-depth view into critical events.

What’s new in the critical event management market

Relatively new, developments in proactive critical event management aren’t happening in a silo, either. 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. Instead, customers have been looking for management systems and multiple use case solutions to ensure continuous improvement. 

Within that software market, what innovative capabilities to look out for? We recommend the following:

• Crisis management.
  Advanced solutions apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. Built on international standards, such as ISO 22398, the solutions enable faster response, better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, ensuring better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement
• Incident response plans and checklists.
  Best-practice libraries come included do organisations can easily create crisis strategies and action plans for different types of events that define the required strategy, action items, completion time targets, and people involved.
• Critical infrastructure protection.
  Innovative solutions keep up with the escalating risk to key assets, assessing those risks in advance and monitoring critical facilities throughout the emergency response process.
• Welfare checks.
  The solutions enable organisations to send welfare check messages to their event response staff or any other type of contact. Organisations can easily collect their replies to identify who needs assistance and prioritise follow-up actions.
• Crisis communications. 
  These single systems help organisations manage complex communications, centralising, approving, and standardising their crisis response. these solutions provide effective communication pathways for all aspects of incident management.
• Emergency management.
  These tools provided all that is needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS, and other national standards. They keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.
• Incident and resource mapping.
  Comes equipped with powerful mapping tools to create multilayers maps, integrating both external feeds and any information housed within the platform.
• Operational cycle management.
  These systems support the battle rhythm of your response operations, understanding and tracking reporting periods.
• Community lifeline monitoring.
  These systems provide executive-level insight into safety threats to the public and to staff, by regularly assessing community lifelines.

Finally, exiting 2020, many businesses hoped the worst was behind them. Then 2021 came along, with the pandemic giving way to a roiling supply chain and labour crisis. 

Now, 2022 augurs much of the same; threats coming from every direction. 

What can be done to ensure organisations stay solvent, successful, and ahead of the curve? Well, those businesses will have to get serious about critical event management strategies, breaking out of organisational siloes by investing in advanced critical event management solutions, like Noggin, that give you all the tools and information needed to manage any event effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, thereby keeping the whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture.

Sources

i. Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections: World hammered by record 50 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020. Available at https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by-record-50billion-dollar-weather-disasters-in-2020/

ii. Connor Taylor with Rodolphe d’Arjuzon, Verdantix: Smart Innovators: Critical Event Management.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Ibid.