Two weeks ago, Fire Services reported an explosion in a large warehouse complex in the waterfront district. The explosion was heard by residents across the city. According to the incident commander on scene the thick, turbulent, black smoke pouring out from the complex was highly toxic. This fire was dangerous, but by the time morning rush hour started, the city’s first responders had the fire extinguished. Later in the week, this reporter had a chance to interview the Director of Emergency Management about his role in working with several agencies to manage public safety incidents.
Q: Whenever a public safety incident happens, we hear mention of the “Director of Emergency Management” mentioned a lot, but the public never sees you. What’s your role in safeguarding the public?
A: My job is to be in the center of things, to gather information and coordinate with other people and departments, and sometimes other jurisdictions. There are people working for me, including logistics and operations people, finance people and planning experts, and they are all relying on me to coordinate information and resources. It’s my responsibility to share insight and to help others make better decisions. Lots of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of assets are at risk if I don’t do my job well. But if I do, then I can help save lives and limit losses.
Q: What’s your biggest challenge that you have to deal with?
A: I’ve got two: not having great situational awareness and imperfect integration across agencies and their systems. If I can’t get enough good information, and can’t see the forest for the trees, then I can’t make the best decisions. And if I can’t communicate across systems, then incident commanders and field personnel can’t act on my advice.
Q: It seems like information is critical to doing your job, but there seems to be so much going on at once. How do you keep up with all this information and use it effectively?
A: You’re right, having information and being able to use it to get the big picture, that’s one of most important things about my job. I have to be constantly up to speed to maintain 360-degree situational awareness. Everything is priority #1. From alerting the right people to bring the right resources, from the right places, at the right time, to thinking about how the weather will impact my response and envisioning all the cascading implications of my decisions … I need to pay attention to a lot, all the time.
Q: With all this information and all of your responsibilities and demands on your attention, how do you keep up with it all?
A: Well, I’ll tell you, I’m far better off at doing my job now than I was even a year ago. Back then, I’d have lots of data from video, from sensors and from personnel on scene. I was even getting unstructured data feeds from media reports and from bystanders using Twitter. But it was hard to keep it all organized, harder to extract good, meaningful insight from it, and even harder to be confident that I was making the best decisions from it all.
I have all this data and more today, and it’s arriving in near real time. But the difference is that I’m using some technology in the command center to help me organize my data, get some real insight out of it, and it helps me make better decisions.
Q: What does the technology help you do?
A: In the command center, the technology boils down to helping manage and visualize all the data feeding into the center. It enables me to engage and collaborate with field personnel and it lets me do “what if” analyses.
Q: Can you tell me more about the capabilities you have today, that you didn’t have before?
A: Sure. First off, the software in the command center system integrates data from all the different sources that are feeding into the center. What comes in from field personnel, dispatchers, weather data, surveillance camera feeds and even the social media I mentioned before. As it’s integrated – and this is happening in real time – the system flashes alerts that are categorized and prioritized automatically. If there’s anything significant, then it gets escalated and can be flagged for additional attention.
Second, the system also tracks the alerts and if it detects a pattern, then we can see patterns that we would never have seen before. Having the big picture view is critical and the analytic tools in the system do things like illuminate the interdependencies between things.
One of the best things that the system analytics let me do is to prescribe the best solution to complex problems. We can align operating procedures with the alert patterns, to enact response and recovery plans, and do this across jurisdictions that are tied into the system. For instance, a fire situation could consume a lot of resources, but I don’t want to focus everything we have on it…there could be lots of other situations that arise. Analytics will help me plan how many personnel should be kept in reserve to protect the rest of the city. Maybe one of the greatest capabilities I have now is to be flexible and update actions as things change in a situation. Tactically, I can collaborate with other people and white board “what ifs”, literally using maps and drawings to work out responses as things change. And, we can get these results out in the field as soon as we’re ready with them.
Q: This certainly sounds like you’re better off than you were before. Is there anything that you can’t do now that you wish you could do?
A: These analytic tools are as important to me today, as my radio and computer were a few years ago. When personnel are equipped with technology that’s connected and interoperating, that helps me make the most of the available data. It makes me more intelligent about the situation and how best to coordinate it. In the big scheme of things, the more people and assets that are connected and sharing data, the better my awareness and decision making is. But, not everyone is connected, so even though I’m better off than I was, there’s still room for me to improve. That’s what I’d really like, is to get everyone interoperating and working from the same, true, operational picture.
This article was written to discuss how big data management and analytics enables Directors of Emergency Management do their jobs better. The city and Director of Emergency Management in the article are fictitious, but the author thanks the very real Dr. Gary Nestler of IBM for his keen insight and guidance about some of the daily realities that Directors of Emergency Management face, and how analytics technology helps them.
Q: Whenever a public safety incident happens, we hear mention of the “Director of Emergency Management” mentioned a lot, but the public never sees you. What’s your role in safeguarding the public?
A: My job is to be in the center of things, to gather information and coordinate with other people and departments, and sometimes other jurisdictions. There are people working for me, including logistics and operations people, finance people and planning experts, and they are all relying on me to coordinate information and resources. It’s my responsibility to share insight and to help others make better decisions. Lots of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of assets are at risk if I don’t do my job well. But if I do, then I can help save lives and limit losses.
Q: What’s your biggest challenge that you have to deal with?
A: I’ve got two: not having great situational awareness and imperfect integration across agencies and their systems. If I can’t get enough good information, and can’t see the forest for the trees, then I can’t make the best decisions. And if I can’t communicate across systems, then incident commanders and field personnel can’t act on my advice.
Q: It seems like information is critical to doing your job, but there seems to be so much going on at once. How do you keep up with all this information and use it effectively?
A: You’re right, having information and being able to use it to get the big picture, that’s one of most important things about my job. I have to be constantly up to speed to maintain 360-degree situational awareness. Everything is priority #1. From alerting the right people to bring the right resources, from the right places, at the right time, to thinking about how the weather will impact my response and envisioning all the cascading implications of my decisions … I need to pay attention to a lot, all the time.
Q: With all this information and all of your responsibilities and demands on your attention, how do you keep up with it all?
A: Well, I’ll tell you, I’m far better off at doing my job now than I was even a year ago. Back then, I’d have lots of data from video, from sensors and from personnel on scene. I was even getting unstructured data feeds from media reports and from bystanders using Twitter. But it was hard to keep it all organized, harder to extract good, meaningful insight from it, and even harder to be confident that I was making the best decisions from it all.
I have all this data and more today, and it’s arriving in near real time. But the difference is that I’m using some technology in the command center to help me organize my data, get some real insight out of it, and it helps me make better decisions.
Q: What does the technology help you do?
A: In the command center, the technology boils down to helping manage and visualize all the data feeding into the center. It enables me to engage and collaborate with field personnel and it lets me do “what if” analyses.
Q: Can you tell me more about the capabilities you have today, that you didn’t have before?
A: Sure. First off, the software in the command center system integrates data from all the different sources that are feeding into the center. What comes in from field personnel, dispatchers, weather data, surveillance camera feeds and even the social media I mentioned before. As it’s integrated – and this is happening in real time – the system flashes alerts that are categorized and prioritized automatically. If there’s anything significant, then it gets escalated and can be flagged for additional attention.
Second, the system also tracks the alerts and if it detects a pattern, then we can see patterns that we would never have seen before. Having the big picture view is critical and the analytic tools in the system do things like illuminate the interdependencies between things.
One of the best things that the system analytics let me do is to prescribe the best solution to complex problems. We can align operating procedures with the alert patterns, to enact response and recovery plans, and do this across jurisdictions that are tied into the system. For instance, a fire situation could consume a lot of resources, but I don’t want to focus everything we have on it…there could be lots of other situations that arise. Analytics will help me plan how many personnel should be kept in reserve to protect the rest of the city. Maybe one of the greatest capabilities I have now is to be flexible and update actions as things change in a situation. Tactically, I can collaborate with other people and white board “what ifs”, literally using maps and drawings to work out responses as things change. And, we can get these results out in the field as soon as we’re ready with them.
Q: This certainly sounds like you’re better off than you were before. Is there anything that you can’t do now that you wish you could do?
A: These analytic tools are as important to me today, as my radio and computer were a few years ago. When personnel are equipped with technology that’s connected and interoperating, that helps me make the most of the available data. It makes me more intelligent about the situation and how best to coordinate it. In the big scheme of things, the more people and assets that are connected and sharing data, the better my awareness and decision making is. But, not everyone is connected, so even though I’m better off than I was, there’s still room for me to improve. That’s what I’d really like, is to get everyone interoperating and working from the same, true, operational picture.
This article was written to discuss how big data management and analytics enables Directors of Emergency Management do their jobs better. The city and Director of Emergency Management in the article are fictitious, but the author thanks the very real Dr. Gary Nestler of IBM for his keen insight and guidance about some of the daily realities that Directors of Emergency Management face, and how analytics technology helps them.
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