If your organization’s personnel can read, hear and see what’s happening around them, then they can do something about it – plus analyze response times and protocols after an incident to improve emergency preparedness and response.
The first minutes of an emergency are critical in determining outcomes, so it’s imperative to ensure that accurate and detailed information quickly reaches first responders, including management and employees onsite, as well as outside emergency services if needed.
Besides detecting threats and initiating the appropriate emergency response plans, situational awareness also applies to business operations. It’s all about turning the inefficient — alarms — into the efficient — detailed alerts delivered to the right people on the right devices so they can deal with an unfolding situation in the right way.
With situational awareness delivered in real time to as many communication devices as possible, action can be taken to prevent loss of life, property, business and convenience. In other words, situational awareness makes key individuals, select personnel groups or entire populations aware of potential problems before they become costly disruptions or full-scale emergencies.
As we start 2014, we’re going to use our blog to introduce you to situational awareness as a risk management strategy. So stay tuned each week as we explore its primary components and applications, along with some specific case studies.
Along the way, you may begin to ponder a few questions:
- If I have a lot of people and stuff to protect, have I determined potential threats to them and how to respond?
- What mechanisms do I have in place to deliver live intelligence to my staff and others?
- Is this information able to be delivered in the most up-to-date fashion to preferred communication devices? If not, what’s preventing this capability?
See you here next week because our goal is to make sure you’re in “The KNOW.”
