Emergency

Purchasing Emergency
Management Software:
A buyer’s guide
 2

Not all emergency management technology is made equal

Despite enormous strides in emergency and incident
management technology, volunteer disaster and
emergency response organizations, when queried, still
acknowledge facing stark challenges – none graver than
a sharp increase in the volume of emergencies agencies
face individually. It’s chiefly this growth in the number
and severity of emergencies – usually unaccompanied by
an offsetting budgetary and/or staffing increasei – that
cancels out many of the positive benefits agencies hope
to accrue from their advanced, emergency management
software buys.
Often, though, the solutions themselves don’t offer
necessary respite for procuring agencies. For instance,
advanced emergency management technology can
require more, dedicated IT expertise (to implement) than
agencies have to provide: the IT function is notoriously
overburdened in emergency response organizations, and
some system implementations and configurations are
inordinately cumbersome and time-consuming.
Additionally, once configured, software functionality
often only provides value for emergency response, not the
entirety of the emergency management life cycle,
where teams are already falling short in preparing for
non-response phasesii.
Fortunately, the right advanced emergency management
technologies can help organizations overcome these
common challenges and start tackling every aspect of
emergency management, throughout the entirety of the
emergency management life cycle. The only thing agencies
need is to ascertain the exact software features they need
to look for in order to help their emergency management
teams thrive.
And that’s where we come in. Using market research,
we’ve pulled together a purchasing guide for emergency
management software buyers, so that they’ll know which
features are essential to minimize the impact of any event
through better incident action planning and process. (Hint:
Extra IT resources won’t be necessary.)
Essential benefits your emergency
management and disaster preparedness
system should deliver
Establish accurate situational intelligence
during an emergency

If software only (further) masks strategic blind spots,

emergency and business continuity planning and recovery Planning
will continue to get short shrift, much to the detriment
of larger emergency management goals. One deleterious
spillover effect we see in the literature: teams proceed
Command and leadership
with noticeably divergent understandings of emergency
risk, as well as how to communicate, react, respond to,
recover and learn from incidentsiii. Another: teams also
say that they approach emergencies too reactively. Even Training and exercises
emergency preparedness is undercut when drafters
and implementers are disconnected; the latter group
implement plans differently than planners expect, then Collaboration and communication
lessons learned from plan simulations (when they do
occur) don’t get integrated back into the plans.

Purchasing Emergency Management Software: A buyer’s guide


What to look for in emergency management software
Improve situational awareness.
Situational awareness is crucial to emergency
response, the precondition for effective decision
making and performance in complex, dynamic
emergency situationsiv. But situational awareness
rests on a key informational component: decision
makers need information from the field that
they can integrate with their decision-making
goals. That places a high bar on data quality;
data should be of sufficiently high quality to let
decision makers describe relationships between
thingsv. Assumptions should also go into an
emergency management system, too, so that
they’re relayed transparently to all stakeholders.
And that’s where many emergency management
solutions fall down. They don’t gather sufficient
intelligence, thereby limiting the level of
situational awareness teams can achieve.
What to look for instead? Well, buyers should procure
software that provides situational awareness for each
event as well as steady state operations. Search for a
solution that transmits intelligence from diverse sources
and methods, including field personnel, data and GIS
feeds, email, and SMS.
That intelligence will facilitate informed decision making,
which advanced emergency management software can
improve, as well. Best-practice solutions will provide
comprehensive dashboards for events and operations, as
well as integrated, map-based functionality for visualizing
the locations of incidents, risks, people, and assets.
Focus on resource and capability management.
In the midst of an emergency, getting the right
resources, to the right place, at the right time
can prove the difference between life or death.
Those are the stakes of resource management:
materials, supplies, technologies, and especially
responders must be deployed to the disaster
zone as efficiently as possible.
Not just that, though. Efficient resource management,
while important, is only half the battle. The other half is
no less trying. And that’s the task of ensuring the maximal
productivity of resources once they do reach the disaster
zone, i.e. capability management.
Resources and capabilities go hand in hand. Capabilities
link resources and strategies to effective actions in
the field. Managing one without considering the other
dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the response
effort. But too often, emergency management software
siloes those two components, if the technology treats
capability and resource management at all.
Purchasing Emergency Management Software: A buyer’s guide
3
At a glance: Essential resource
management functionality
Teams need a strong, shared understanding of
the situation at hand. But achieving that level
of situational awareness can be nigh impossible
without the right resource management tools,
especially for teams who rely on verbal interactions
and manual processes.
Instead, teams should look for a robust, integrated
resource management system to help increase
operational effectiveness, achieve shared situational
awareness, increase the speed of command, and
enhance security. The ideal system should have the
following features and functionality:
Mapping. Location tracking of resources
in relation to assignment locations
helps teams find the closest available
resources quickly.
Mobile app. Mobile-optimized software
helps teams communicate with staff and
volunteers wherever they are.
Rostering and scheduling. Enables teams
to create flexible resource assignment
structures that can be filled and activated
when needed.
Resource allocation. Helps teams better
engage with staff and volunteers to
confirm availability and assign roles via
email, SMS, and/or voice recording.
Certification and documentation
management. Ensures that documents are
managed and kept up to date. Teams won’t
have to worry about staff or volunteers
with expired certifications.
What should buyers be looking for, instead? Teams
should procure software that enables advance capability
and resource planning, reinforced by delegation,
communication, decision making, and (even) inter-
agency coordination. Key is an integrated solution that
can manage emergency assets and resources, including
credentials and certifications. That technology should be
able to manage resource requests (best-practice resource
request workflows, in particular, can be quite helpful)
as well as expenses and mutual aid requests. To further
ease the burden on incident managers and dispatchers,
the solution should also be able to dispatch teams,
already established with required capabilities and on-call
resources, and mobilize (and demobilize) resources, as well
as collaborate with, command and coordinate teams
and resources.

Effective and efficient incident response.
What brings all of these elements together is
effective and efficient emergency response at
the incident site. And here, advanced technology
can also help emergency management teams
bolster common response efforts, search and
rescue, evacuation systems and procedures,
shelters, disaster impact reports, medical care,
etc. Only thing is the software in question
will need robust functionality to deliver core
benefits, like increased coordination and efficient
information exchange.
First things first. Nothing improves incident coordination
more than system flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s where
a lot of solutions fall down: they only offer advanced
functionality in discrete mission areas. Instead, teams need
to be able to manage all information, communications,
plans, and tasks within a single, flexible platform. Specific
features to improve communication and facilitate
collaboration include alerts, dashboards, and collaboration
spaces for teams, as well as notifications and updates via
email, SMS, voice, or in app.
Teams also stand to gain in their incident response efforts
from internalizing lessons learned from the field – not
even just their prior experiences but collective best
practices from the industry at large. What are we talking
about, here? Some solutions come pre-configured with
best-practice incident templates, forms, dashboards,
and plans, covering common incidents like active armed
offender, bomb threat, fire/explosion, emergency
evacuation, emergency lockdown, emergency shelter in
place, hurricane and other severe weather.
This library of plans, checklists, work instructions, and
actions can help improve command and leadership, as
well. Fully-configurable workflows can lead people through
common procedures, automating repetitive aspects of the
dispatch process, thus removing some of the burden from
dispatchers and incident managers. An example: best-
practice workflows can provide standard procedures for
complex tasks like activating and deactivating emergency
operations centers (EOCs), or establishing incident
management teams including cell structures, roles, and
required capabilities.
Finally, the recent surge in incidents has knocked
emergency teams back on their heels. Sure, those teams
are benefiting from strides made in emergency and
incident management technology. But they’re not getting
enough bang for their buck, since too many of the most
powerful solutions offer functionality that’s too narrow
in scope. Instead of just treating emergency response,
software buyers should purchase advanced technology
that treats every stage of the emergency management
lifecycle, without sacrificing excess time and money to
burdensome IT interventions.
Purchasing Emergency Management Software: A buyer’s guide
4
Putting it all together:
An essential emergency management
feature checklist
ü Establish incident management teams including
cell structures, roles, capabilities required and
on-call resources
ü Manage emergency assets and resources
including standardized types, equipment,
inventory and stock levels, and personnel
credentials and certifications.
ü Gather intelligence and situational awareness
via field personnel, data and GIS feeds, email or
SMS, displayed on comprehensive dashboards
for each event, and for watch desk and steady
state operations
ü Activate emergency operations centers and
dispatch teams
ü Prepare and distribute incident action plans,
incident objectives, strategies and considerations
ü Dashboards and collaboration spaces for
emergency teams – command, operations,
planning, logistics, finance & administration, and
public information
ü Command and coordinate teams and resources
with a library of plans, checklists, work
instructions and actions
ü Assess and report on damage, raise related
actions to respond or recover.
ü Log activities, updates, decisions, events, facts,
or assumptions
ü Produce situation reports, briefings, situation
summaries and intelligence reports
ü Communicate alerts, notifications and updates
via email, SMS, voice or the Noggin app
ü Mobilize and demobilize resources and
manage resource requests and mutual aid
assistance requests
ü Record expenses and procurement information,
supply and travel requests.
ü Forms and dashboards for aviation operations
ü Manage critical infrastructure asset information,
conduct emergency risk assessments, and risk
mitigation actions.
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Citations

i. Pew: What We Don’t Know About State Spending on Natural Disasters Could Cost Us: Data limitations, their implications for policymaking, and
strategies for improvement. Available at https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2018/06/19/what-we-dont-know-about-state-
spending-on-natural-disasters-could-cost-us.
ii. Andrew CK Lee, Wendy Phillips, Kirsty Challen, et. al. BCM Public Health: Emergency management in health: key issues and challenges in the UK.
Available at https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-12-884.
iii. Ibid.
iv. John R. Harrald and Theresa Jefferson: Shared Situational Awareness in Emergency Management Mitigation and Response. Available at
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221182988_Shared_Situational_Awareness_in_Emergency_Management_Mitigation_and_Response.
v. Ibid.

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