FEATURE IT’S APP-ENING
Michael Kenrick, Operations Manager at Incident Control Room, part of Zenith Technologies, looks at how digital technology and mobile applications are transforming incident management.
Effective incident management relies on organisations having solid plans in place to rapidly identify, respond to and mitigate challenging situations that could negatively impact their business. How organisations react is down to their existing plans and procedures, which not only prepare and inform staff on how to respond, but can also improve organisational structures, build customer and stakeholder confidence, manage the containment of incidents, and control the resulting financial impact.
Until recently, incident management has largely relied on paper-based systems, with emergency planning procedures often stored on shared drives in PDF formats, which can make offsite access and regular review more difficult.
Technology-driven incident management solutions are now emerging to provide transformative opportunities for organisations to overhaul their response strategies.
A DIGITAL APPROACH Digital approaches to incident management are streamlining emergency response procedures in many sectors. By providing access to incident plans through handheld devices, live information can be quickly shared to the right people regardless of their location. As a result, interaction is more frequent and incident information can be distributed with ease.
Centralised systems enable all team members involved in an incident response to be incorporated into plans with tailored directions. They are then guided through workflows and procedures via a series of action cards to tell them what they need to do. The process streamlines how incidents are handled and ensures every incident is responded to in a consistent way.
When organisations are spread across multiple offices or facilities, incident response team members can access the relevant information no matter what their location. Decision making off site is now possible, and incidents can be effectively managed remotely. Through an app, individuals in midline management can also have more flexibility to handle incidents and can easily communicate real-time updates to higher management.
If an organisation is required to manage more than one incident at a time, app-based solutions can also provide a single touch point for crisis management enabling multiple incidents to be dealt with simultaneously.
ALL IN THE APP App-based incident management tools have been designed to deliver a more robust and reliable software platform for the management and reporting of major and minor incidents. User-friendly interfaces
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ensure teams have everything they need when they are called to respond to an event.
Internal and external teams / contacts can be accessed based on who needs to be informed about a given incident, allowing all members to be quickly updated. Travelling members of staff can also access a live incident remotely from their mobile phone or laptop and track the events as they happen.
Each action carried out during an incident response is dated and time-stamped to create a complete audit trail of every decision made.
Reports are readily available for debriefs with senior management, while metrics also provide a comprehensive picture of the overall performance of an organisation.
PRAGMATIC IMPLEMENTATION To digitalise their incident response functions, many organisations are now choosing to work with expert vendors who can assist them in centralising their plans and procedures. By carrying out in-depth analyses of an organisation’s needs during a wide- range of incidents.
Having a third-party with knowledge and experience of dealing with many different situations can help to pinpoint gaps in management plans and identify steps to enhance response. Training can also be delivered so that all team members know how to use systems and can respond rapidly if an event occurs.
FINAL THOUGHT Everything is at the click of a button from any location and enables incident teams to make better decisions and, crucially, control the resulting impact of disruptive events on an organisation.
Mobile apps can help consolidate incident documentation, improve accessibility to information, and provide an effective reporting strategy.
www.incidentcontrolroom.com
www.zenithtechnologies.com
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