Imagine this… What do you do?
donaldlloyd
in Climate Change, COVID-19, Crisis and Emergency Management, Emergency Management, Events, Government, Indigenous, Industry News, NGO, Tips
Imagine this real-life scenario, which I experienced years ago in an emergency management role. You are on call and your boss phones you late at night to say there are reports of wide-spread flooding in a remote area of your region. The flooding is affecting residential properties as well as farms. There is concern for the safety of people as well as livestock.
You drive 50 kilometres from home to an isolated valley in the mountains, which features a lake, a river, a bedroom community, and farms. It is dark and raining buckets. You do not get far up the valley before you encounter water on the road. You proceed with caution but when the water is up to your Suburban vehicle doors, you decide to stop.
It is pitch black, you cannot see anything, and you are the only person out there. What do you do? The answer, of course, is “…it depends”. On data.
Today, for almost 70 percent of emergency managers, the data they rely upon to make critical decisions and take action is stored mostly in Outlook, Word documents, Excel files, and ArcGIS. This essential data is not integrated, and it is often spread across multiple departments. Therefore, it cannot be queried readily, and it cannot be applied visually across applications for assigning tasks, tracking resources, or creating comprehensive reports. Even worse, the data is largely inaccessible when it is needed most – especially for our intrepid emergency manager sitting in rising water late at night.
An easy-to-use solution to this problem lies in the creation of a centralized database that is geo-enabled, integrated across multiple applications and workflows, and accessible via any iPhone or Android device. If you are thinking this solution must be expensive and difficult to implement, it is neither. When compared to the costs of the human and material resources needed to operate an emergency management or public safety organization, the solution represents an insignificant cost, and it delivers a big punch in terms of the value it offers. Moreover, the solution can be implemented remotely with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.
We need to focus on data management to give our people an opportunity to be much more effective in fulfilling their increasingly important roles and responsibilities. What’s holding us back? Contact me for an exploratory discussion. (https://countercrisis-tech.com/contact-us/)
