Steps for Emergency Services to Broaden Their Purpose
… continued from A More Proactive Emergency Services Enhances Resilience
This series of posts started with the discovery and inquiry about the new Chief Resilient Officer position in my city government. It evolved as I learned more about the resilience efforts and become motivated to develop the capacity within the emergency services. The following policy options outline resource allocations to promote an elaborated approach and should be viewed as strategy formulation to build resilience, not limited to a unique desirable action or reaction.
- Integrate the Resilience Officer (RO) into the Incident Command System (ICS) for a universal application. See previous post — A More Proactive Emergency Services Enhances Resilience.
2. Create a Resilience Officer position within your own agency.
Any city that was fortunate to receive staff funding for a CRO from the 100RC foundation should implement a counterpart position within their emergency services. Since the selected cities are extremely large urban areas, the fire service should be professional and well established in the community to assist in creating a more adaptive environment. The benefits to the organization would be more than building relationships (critical) but expand perspectives, leadership, strategy, and team building. Many fire departments are faced with cultural challenges, economic constraints and mission clarity within the homeland security enterprise. The Resilience Officer fire service position would concentrate beyond emergency incident management and short-term goals, and instead develop an organizational capability for interoperability, innovation, and collaboration across the five mission areas — prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery. More importantly, as the fire service position works with the CRO on the examination of interconnected social, cultural, physical and political challenges it will expand the fire service purpose and mission.
You can substitute police department, public health…in the preceding paragraph — all are entrenched within the community. Once these positions are established and well valued, the positions can be replicated at other cities — creating a mega community sharing procedures, processes and smart practices.
3. Institute Regional / Local Networks (RN)
National organizational shortcomings were exposed in 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, especially in management, information sharing, and interagency relationships. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 initiated the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a framework to enhance interagency communications and coordination. Both Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPD) 5 and 8 require capabilities for all- hazards prevention and response missions. Furthermore, Hurricane Katrina exposed national fundamental faults especially in preparedness and the reaction was an imperative for inter-organizational collaboration for complex problems that spanned jurisdictional or organizational boundaries. The resultant National Preparedness Guidelines directs a shared responsibility in preparedness for all hazards as a national goal. Federal prevention and response efforts to enhance national security and welfare mandated inter-organizational collaboration, but without governance or methodologies. The need to address complex problems and respond to changing conditions and future uncertainties require overarching strategies that leverage strong coordinated solutions and shared capabilities. The evolution of networks in the private sector demonstrates key principles for collaborative partnerships that may be applied in public management. Prior to the creation of DHS, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted a new governance of organizations based on the impact of the advances in communication and information technologies, but more importantly determined by the market or customer satisfaction. Drucker forecast the development of collaborative networks in response to corporate management’s inadequacies to globalization challenges. The structure and strategy of collaborative networks was based on the principle that, “No one company, entity, government, or association has the talent, resources, or time for the continual innovation that the global marketplace demands. No single company, industry, sector, or country can solve the critical issues facing society today.” It is rationale public management should emulate private sector’s practice in network organizing for collaboration.
Establish a multi-agency and multi-discipline partnership focusing initial efforts on developing regional networks to foster future collaboration and innovative diversity to address formulation and implementation of resilient standards and information sharing complications. Research demonstrates the need for organizational collaboration for complex issues that cross agency boundaries or jurisdictions. For complex problems that span bureaucratic boundaries the network may be a more effective organization to share technologies, leverage expertise, and provide lateral processes for flexibility and innovative opportunities. The use of networks promotes collaboration and provides a flexible management mechanism to advance information sharing, reduce competitive redundancy, and afford a more responsive organization.
4. Initiate specific Task Forces (TF)
Simply a TF is the combination of resources assembled for a specific mission. There is general consensus in NIMS, NATO, and other federal literature on the composition of a Task Force. Key characteristics are a designated leader, common communications and relevance is purpose specific. The ad hoc nature signifies a TF is temporary and not intended to be adapted to other specific tasks. The use of a Task Force to design specific resilient standards and disseminate may limit future technical knowledge management but can be politically and economically advantageous.
5. Sanction a National Workgroup (WG)
A centralized body established to support the federal, state and local networks strategic and operational responsibilities. Many national workgroups provide guidance to develop policies, programs and other products to address the needs. A National Resilient Workgroup may recommend standards and policy, facilitate regulatory changes, identify enablers and barriers, and provide smart practices. The structured platform should have appropriate governance and authority to implement a doctrine and provide a proactive, long-term direction, but not be prescriptive. The goal should be high-level guidelines and definitive concepts for direction in operational protocols and coordinated command and control for resiliency research, planning, response and recovery.
I thank you for letting me share some ideas on enhancing resilience and the roles of emergency service. For the sake of brevity, the last items were short but not any less important. Next post will be the conclusion — hopefully I can collect some comments to be shared.
