What is Critical Event Management?
Critical event management is the cross-functional approach to managing the preparedness, response, and recovery from events that impact an organization’s continuity, operations, and security.
The advantages of such an approach are numerous. Critical event management enables effective cross-departmental communication and coordination, providing response managers with a consolidated real-time view of threats, automated capabilities to assess and respond to those threats, and information capture capabilities at from the reports.
These benefits stand out from traditional incident management mechanisms. Too often, these mechanisms are siloed in a single department. This is even though critical events themselves rarely respect sharp departmental boundaries.
Critical Event Management Challenges You Should Consider
However, many obstacles combine to make it difficult to manage critical events. On the one hand, the ongoing COVID crisis, now prolonged by the highly transmissible Omicron wave, has led to workforce fragmentation more than ever.
Why is this important? Since employees work from anywhere, employers need even more data on where those workers are, to keep them safe in line with duty of care obligations.
Employers were struggling to collect this kind of data even before the pandemic.
In addition, effective management of critical events requires equally effective communications. However, today’s workers are inundated with communications, thanks in part to the rapid adoption of business communication tools.
Being inundated with so many messages only makes it more likely that employees will cut off emergency communications when it matters most.
Employers are also not off the hook once they have collected employee data.
Most countries these days have data privacy regulations, placing many restrictions on what organizations can do with the personally identifiable information they have in their systems.
The world’s largest economic bloc, the European Union, has one of the strictest data privacy frameworks, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Major jurisdictions, like the State of California, have even modeled their data privacy programs on the GDPR.
When it comes to data, compliance risk isn’t the only critical event management challenge either. Siled data sources also contribute to making it more difficult to manage critical events.
Data tends to come from multiple systems during a critical event. Too often, however, this data is stored in systems that do not communicate with each other.
This makes the task of leveraging payload data across operations to better inform response nearly impossible.
The technological solution to ensure the safety of employees and the resilience of organizations
What can be done to overcome these challenges? Here, critical event management solutions come in handy. These are software platforms and related services designed to manage a facility’s preparedness, response, and recovery from events that impact continuity, operations, and security.
But not just high impact events either. Critical event management solutions can also help organizations manage low impact issues.
This gives organizations more bang for their buck. They can use the same tools to handle small, routine issues as they do for larger impact events.
So what core components of critical event management solutions should you consider? Well, to nogginwe suggest the following features:
- Emergency mass notification tools for targeted communications. Enables effective crisis and emergency communications with affected individuals and response teams. Offers the benefit of increasing response efficiency and reducing the risks faced by personnel during critical events.
- Tracking employees to maintain duty of care. Helps identify threats to affected personnel wherever they are. Staff can leverage these capabilities if they themselves feel threatened or during critical events to alert employers to their status.
- Incident management to improve the effectiveness of emergency response. Serves as centralized hubs, or virtual emergency operations centers, to process incoming situation and risk data and manage the response effort. Provides response teams with a detailed view of critical events.
While the new year is still young, smart business leaders understand that the threat of critical events remains high.
What can be done to ensure that organizations remain resilient, their employees safe, wherever they are?
Well, these companies will need to take critical event management strategies seriously. This means breaking out of organizational silos by investing in advanced critical event management solutions that give you all the tools you need to effectively manage any event throughout its lifecycle, keeping the whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform and viewing the same operating image.
If you’re ready to learn more about how to tackle the top critical event management challenges, download this free guide from Noggin: Introductory Guide to Critical Event Managementyou.
