Corporate Crisis Management: 5 Challenges & Solutions
Easy access to up-to-date, structured, and reliable information can heighten situational awareness and improve the entire incident response process.
When an incident occurs, both incident responders and managers are faced with high volumes of information. Their priority is to bring the incident to a swift ending. This means that efficient management of information can relieve some pressure.
1. Paper-Based Information Gathering
When an incident occurs, a high volume of information is traditionally captured by completing paper-based forms by hand, which are later processed. The biggest shortcomings of the paper-based system are the poor quality of the records, a lack of contextual information, and difficulty in instantly analyzing any data captured. Digital forms allow for greater consistency and interoperability.
With D4H Incident Management, you can pre-build all of your incident or ICS forms into the system. Users can then collaboratively fill out the form, with all information updating for all users in real-time. The D4H Incident Management mobile app makes this even more convenient for work on the go.
Once a form has been completed, it can be digitally signed. Signing a form will lock it. This means that it is uneditable by you or other users. Whoever signed the form, approved it. Unlocking a form will erase all signatures on the form.
2. Time Stamping Information
After an incident has occurred there is a need to report on the events. A major difficulty is recording the times and sequence in which events and tasks occurred. When using paper a possibility is the use of rubber stamps, these are often used in offices to stamp the current date, however, this is a cumbersome task. The most efficient method is using a digital timestamp, the time at which an event is recorded by a computer.
D4H Incident Management has a full audit trail where all information collected is assigned a source, timestamp, and version history. Quickly access, search, and filter using our unique ‘FollowMe Logging’. All of this data, snapshots and all uploaded attachments may be exported as a chronological audit trail once the incident has resolved.
3. Recording of Tasks
Task management is the process of managing a task through its life cycle. Effective task management requires managing all aspects of a task, including its status, priority, time, human and financial resources, notifications, and so on. These can be lumped together broadly into the basic activities of task management. The difficulty during a high-stakes event is that tasks are assigned to multiple individuals or teams and there are a number of stages to monitor from who has been assigned the task to whether it’s completed/failed.
D4H Incident Management’s built-in tasks and checklists enable you to organize everything you need to keep track of. Manage actions from creation through to completion so that they get done faster. Design task workflows, forms, and checklists, to assign and delegate out the actions to teams and personnel.
4. Access to Documentation
Often response plans are bulky paper documents in folders that are stored on a bookcase in an operation center. When needed such folders may not be available immediately at the scene and depending on the scenario personnel may not be familiar with the relevant parts of a plan they are to enact.
D4H’s digital document library allows you to store and share your incident response documentation within the platform to ensure all responders have the most recent up-to-date information. The software is cloud-based, so documentation can be accessed on any device, from any location.
5. Managing Multiple Sources of Information
During an incident, information is everywhere and arriving in many forms. Managers may be receiving radio communications, video streams, photos, calls, emails, texts, alarm notifications, and paper forms. Finding the best method to manage it is a major challenge. The ideal solution when managing such large volumes of information is to capture all the data in an information management system that acts as a single source of truth. D4H Incident Management enables you to consolidate your response to one single platform and collaborate on a resolution using forms, tasks, logs, maps, and status boards.
