The new normal looks grim, with threats coming from all directions.
The new normal calls for a radical rethinking of critical event management
Hopes for a COVID-free 2022 are quickly fading. Many parts of the world, including Western Europe and much of the United States, are entering another wave, with endemicity (not eradication) likely to meet them on the other side.
COVID isn’t the only source of disruption to expect next year. Last year, 87% of organizations experienced at least one critical event unrelated to the pandemic, according to industry data.
Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages also remain acute, while severe weather events are increasing in nature, cost and intensity – 2020 alone saw record weather disasters of 50 billion of dollars.
Indeed, a confluence of forces is creating the need for organizations to rethink their critical event management practices – often they have changed those practices to respond to the initial COVID outbreak.
Challenges for Effective Management of Critical Events
The only problem is that the sheer volume of critical events has only made it harder to handle critical events effectively. How?
The geographical fragmentation of the workforce, on the one hand, has made the preparation and response to critical events more difficult; employers must maintain the same duties of care – only now more of their employees are working alone and/or in remote locations.
Employers also often work without granular information about the location of their employees. This is the type of data needed to keep employees safe and reduce the risk of events that could impact business continuity.
Not only that. The integration of virtual communication tools means workers are inundated with messages. The problem is that this excess of corporate communications makes it more difficult for emergency communications to pass.
Many of the challenges to effectively managing critical events are also holdovers from the pre-COVID era. Data sources, such as HR databases, remain siled or scattered across multiple systems, none of which integrate with the other.
As a result, critical events now occur without organizations being able to extract information from their highly fragmented systems with the speed needed to inform crisis decision-making.
Digitization of critical event management
And that’s when management systems are fully digitized. Too many organizations still depend on manual processes and paper-based methods to manage critical events.
What do you need instead? To nogginwe recommend digitizing critical event management, with software solutions and associated services designed to manage an organization’s preparation, response and recovery from events impacting continuity, operations and security.
Indeed, organizations simply cannot modernize their critical event management programs without digitizing software systems. According to independent analysts, such as Verdantix[i]the main components of these digitized solutions include:
- Emergency mass notification tools for targeted communications
- Tracking employees to maintain duty of care
- Incident management to improve the effectiveness of emergency response
What to Look for in the Critical Event Management Market
However, not all software is created equal. Organizations need to implement optimized solutions to improve their modern critical event management strategies.
To this end, organizations must first pursue strategies to improve their resilience to the changing business environment. These policies should look like the following:
1. Identify attributes of organizational resilience
2. Understand the business environment and associated risks
3. Building an effective and empowered leadership class
4. Improve information and knowledge sharing
5. Building an Integrated Resilience Program
Of course, some critical event management solutions are more likely to help organizations pursue best-practice based resiliency strategies. These solutions take advantage of key digital innovations that are pouring into the critical area of event management, for example, interfaces and experiences, business enablement and productivity.
What do they have in common? The solutions in question have the following innovative capabilities:
- Apply best practices, such as international standards, to plan, respond to and manage critical events and exercises
- Leverage out-of-the-box plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights to enable faster response, better collaboration, decision-making, and continuous improvement
- Include best practice libraries to help organizations create event-specific crisis strategies and action plans
- Provide the critical infrastructure protection needed to address escalating risks to key assets
- Let organizations send welfare verification messages and collect responses to identify who needs help and prioritize follow-up
- Manage complex communications, centralizing, approving and standardizing crisis response
- Follow international, national and regional emergency and incident management best practices so that response teams follow the same plans, communicate on the same platform and view the same operational picture
- Create multi-layered maps, integrating both external feeds and any information hosted on the platform.
Finally, the new normal looks grim, with threats coming from all directions.
Organizations, as such, have their work cut out for them to stay solvent, successful and ahead of the curve.
What will it take? In 2022, enterprises must take seriously the modernization of critical event management strategies. This requires a serious commitment to digital critical event management solutions that are equipped with the tools and information needed to effectively manage any event throughout its lifecycle, breaking down silos, keeping the whole team following the same script and ensuring continuous improvement.
James Boddam Whitham is CEO at noggin.
Authorized additive: If you want to learn more about how you can digitize your critical event management strategies, Noggin is hosting a User Conference virtual event on December 2 with guest speakers such as Woolworths Group, Sydney University of Technology, Sydney Airport (Aviation) and Victoria Department of Health.
