| The increasingly global nature of business means that employees are now traveling more often to remote manufacturing locations in newly industrialized countries. This increases risk, as the contingencies that companies find themselves confronting are becoming progressively more diverse and challenging. Recurring natural disasters, security breaches, and terrorist attacks have revealed vulnerability in the way that the public and private sectors handle and respond to emergencies. What would your organization do in an emergency situation? Is your crisis management plan adaptive enough to cover travel safety related threats? Will your company’s key decision makers be able to converge and manage the risk in real time? What assets does your organization have at its disposal in an emergency? Do you have established access to qualified outside resources, such as doctors, translators, and negotiators ready to respond on your behalf? Has your disaster planning analysis taken into account the long-term dynamics, dilemmas and damage to productivity and reputation? The efficiency of business continuity planning and a seamless execution and integration of the emergency response process with risk management programs are critical for business performance and governance. While most continuity/resiliency plans prioritize infrastructure, IT and security, minimal significance has been given to the human factors and the ability of corporate decision makers to manage crisis situations. Since the key decision makers with designated crisis management roles, like the CEO, HR manager, Security Director, Legal Counsel, and CFO, travel regularly, it is unlikely for them to be in the same place at the same time during a corporate emergency. To meet these challenges, the DMI security consulting team relied on their extensive military special operations and global executive protection experience and decided to develop an out-of-the-box solution - an interactive, web-based platform that could be used from anywhere at anytime, appropriately named the DMI Integrated Crisis Management System™ (ICMS). This system goes well beyond the typical crisis preparation even in generally well-managed companies. By comparison to the commonly used written crisis management manuals and check lists, ICMS™ applies a real time systematic approach to data collection, authentication and decision-making that assists the corporate management team in their response to crisis situations through an interactive progression matrix. The ICMS™ is a comprehensive application designed to manage both natural and man-made risk scenarios, activities, data and processes both to maintain business continuity and to provide information or support for employees during local, regional, national, and international crises. It provides end-to-end functionality for managing the complete emergency lifecycle including data collection, risk assessment and threat perception validation, intervention planning and scheduling, selection of pre-approved emergency response procedures and checklists. The ICMS™ technology provides corporate executives with a dynamic, integrated, systematic, and modular way to monitor, assess, explain, capture and apply decisions and actions to complex, dynamic, non-linear, inter-related, multi-dimensional problem sets. The ICMS™ synergistic collection of tools empowers the analytical problem solving process and the capabilities to identify patterns and relationships in unstructured information. It functions as an engine that allows for the seamless interaction of knowledge-based and human-like reasoning (interpretation of information) with powerful solution-specific data search computer capabilities, to rapidly consider a vast numbers of hypotheses or decision alternatives and filter them to relatively few for interactive consideration. It allows users to model the possibilities of variable risk mitigation strategies and allocate resources efficiently in accordance to the risks they are assigned to mitigate. It also provides a mechanism to track and measure the effectiveness of those resource allocations in near-real time. ICMS™ promotes teamwork through mutual accountability at times when the urgency of a problem situation might induce taking shortcuts that could prove later to be as costly as the disaster itself. The system has clear protocols that insure that critical information is shared appropriately among key personnel and can be used by anyone with basic Internet experience. To assure functionality and redundancy in the event that some intended users cannot be reached, the graphically enhanced user friendly platform describes each step of the process and explains how to apply them to the situation at hand. By definition, ICMS™ also allows for remote practice and testing with simulated crisis scenarios by anyone with log-on privileges -- a very cost effective alternative to face-to-face “Table Top” training sessions. Updates and modifications can also be done remotely, keeping the program and its solutions current with evolving threats. Advanced capabilities (such as tracking of time, events and risk profiles, status reporting and record keeping, email based notifications and alerts, shared control ownership, and simultaneous occurrences processing) enhance system users’ abilities to implement industry best practices for efficient crisis response and compliance management. As we continue to hope for the best while expending free trade into the growing global market, we must be prepared for the worst and have proven solutions to inherent risks. This first of its kind self-contained Integrated Crisis Management System™ (ICMS) brings corporate self reliance and safety to unprecedented levels. Please contact as at ICMS@directmeasures.com to find out how the Integrated Crisis Management System™ can be implemented for your company. Burning
Need to Protect Enterprises from Wildfires A handful of big-name corporations evacuated their facilities while others concentrated on informing employees about the status of the recent California wildfires that struck Southern California. The bottom line: Security operations with a disaster plan and strong, diverse communications did a better job of handling the wildfires than those without. To view the
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