Emergency Response: Five Useful Practices
Written by Paul Kirvan on January 22, 2009 in Business Continuity, disaster preparedness, Emergency Response.
Advanced government organizations are leading the way by embracing new technologies, capabilities, and ideas that improve emergency response communication. Here are five useful practices that are emerging.
- Anticipate and Pre-Program Content – While the challenge of any emergency is to deliver unique and timely content, a significant portion of the content programming can be done in advance to anticipate needs. Developing classes of content in advance can enable better use of proactive outbound systems, which will significantly alleviate the crush of inbound traffic during emergencies.
- Spread Demand by Leveraging Virtualization and Multi-Agency Capabilities - Agencies that spread capacity across multiple agencies and facilities dramatically reduce peak load volumes. The advantages of such an approach are seen in the growing use of 311 systems. Bringing together multiple agencies helps streamline the emergency response process and funnel inquiries to a central source. This creates a more efficient framework than independent responses from multiple public and private sources.
- Overestimate Capacity Needs – Emergency access demands inevitably lead to spikes in volume. Government organizations should err on the high side of expectations rather than cutting it too close when they estimate their capacity needs.
- Incorporate Multi-Channel Capabilities – Five channels have emerged as the most important ones to support: e-mail, short-message system (SMS) text, self-service voice, live assisted service, and automated outbound calls. The advantage of an integrated multi-channel approach is that it lets citizens enter the system from a variety of access points while still receiving consistent information and instruction. Additional capabilities include fax support, integration with geographic information systems (GIS), and leveraging graphics capabilities such as 3G phones or video.
- Leverage Emerging New Resources – A variety of new resources are available that most agencies have not yet tapped into, but should. For example, in October, the U.S. government began establishing public-private partnerships with commercial mobile service providers to transmit emergency text alerts to mobile phones. The Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency is acting as the agency that validates these emergency text notifications before they are sent to the commercial mobile service providers and then on to mobile phone subscribers.
Tags: Disaster Recovery, emergency preparedness, Emergency Response
