Emergency Management Information System Update

As part of my selection to represent the CDEM Groups I made an undertaking to keep you informed on EMIS progress. Well, we've survived three days of pitch from the three finalists in the EMIS evaluation round. John Hamilton announced at the recent North Island conference that Critchlow (WebEOC), E-Sponder and Intergraph + NC4 were the three providers to be evaluated. Each spent a day demonstrating their products and how these measure up to the RFP requirements plus any additional benefits we would acquire as part of the purchase.

I'm happy to say that we will end up with a product that will do what MCDEM was seeking. We are still to crunch the numbers on the RFP analysis and do a SWOT analysis but my gut feel is that we are down to two contenders. Of these two, I have a personal preference but both have strengths and weaknesses.

Things are on track and I am really excited by the possibilities.

What could this mean for you as CDEM Groups? Well, CDEM Groups can still carry on with no change. If you are currently using a system, you won't be expected to change - although there may be long-term/big picture benefits in adopting the national EMIS. If you are currently considering an EMIS for your Group, I'd wait - you might get one for free. At this stage, it looks like Groups can ride on the coat-tails of MCDEM provided you stick to the core process and principles of the generic workflow for Group and Local EOCs. If you want to tailor this, you would probably be required to purchase a licence (price unknown as this is provider and add-on dependent). To be honest I didn't think any of it was unreasonable on the price front.

What's next - there is a big chunk of work still to happen - we need to be really clear what a generic workflow looks like. What are the job descriptions, what are the plan templates and forms, authorisation processes, generic dashboards, etc etc that Groups would want to see in a core package. These can be tailored to some degree including look and feel, branding etc for each Group but still provide for Group and national roll-up of data. In some cases, this may mean a slight adjustment to your internal processes (or you purchase a licence and tailor the package to suit your processes without corrupting national level data feed requirements). For me, the war cry is consistency and I do think we are seeing some real leadership from MCDEM on this. I hope that as a sector we play the game - this is the start of a new era in CDEM in this country.