- Title:
-
Command and Control: Information and communications technology tools
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- SAMFS
- Authors:
- R. Thompson
- Location:
- South Australia, Australia
Overview
The International Bushfire Research Conference - Incorporating the 15th annual AFAC Conference.
Following on from David Launder's 'Decision-making within the emergency services' presentation, I will discuss the use of Information and Communications Technology in the field.
The Australian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS), provides a framework for setting objectives and building appropriate organisational structures but standard Incident Action Plan forms are not particularly good at presenting information in a format that is conductive to decision making in real-time, rapidly developing situations.
In order to make sound decisions, the relevant information must be gathered, presented and communicated. What are the right tools to do this? Everyone agrees you need a map; pre-identified risks are a bonus, especially if they are available with other GIS layers. A resource map; what is available, where are they, what equipment and skills are available for deployment, are these automatically populated from your CAD system? Organisations are getting better a setting objectives and strategies but they must be readily adaptable with any changes quickly communicated across the incident.
AIIMS provides an organisational structure but how are risks managed? Do we use a standard Risk Matrix to implement control measures and document residual risk?
There are a myriad of tools that can do all these things but they should be pulled together in a way that assists decision making as well as recording and communicating those decisions.
For most of us these tools are used fairly infrequently; a few times a year- how well would you manage your email calender and tasks list if you only used Outlook as often, and only when you are under intense pressure and scrutiny?
So tools must be robust, automatically populate as much information as possible and be incredibly intuitive to use. I will demonstrate the tools that the SA Metropolitan Fire Service are adopting to improve decision making, incident command and control as well as providing valuable debriefing and accountability information.
