Emergency Incident Management Software

The best crisis management software can help you integrate all of your organization’s crisis management tools into one toolkit to keep you organized after a crisis. In this guide, we’ll review the best emergency incident management software, crisis management software and open source emergency management software to help you find the perfect fit for your organization.

In this guide, we reveiw the aspects of Emergency Incident Management Software, best crisis management software, open source emergency management software, incident command software.

Emergency Incident Management Software

Emergency management software is the most important tool for any organization that needs to manage the potential for disaster. Emergency Management Software can help your company monitor events and prepare for emergencies, but it’s also essential for managing natural disasters and other unexpected events. There are many types of emergency management software available today: some are designed specifically to help businesses with their emergency response plans, while others can be used as part of an overall emergency management solution that encompasses multiple components. It’s important to know which type will work best for you before making a decision.

Emergency Management Software

Emergency Management Software is the software that helps in managing emergency response. It helps to manage emergency response effectively, efficiently and strategically. Emergency Management Software provides support during an emergency situation with pre-configured plans and customizable templates; it also allows users to create new plans based on their specific requirements.

Emergency Response Solutions

Emergency Response Solutions (ERS) is the leading provider of software for emergency response, crisis management, incident management and disaster recovery. ERS has a global footprint with over 2,000 customers in over 110 countries across every continent including North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia/Pacific region. ERS’s solutions are used by organizations across all sectors: governments; utility companies; commercial; industrial and manufacturing; education & health care institutions.

Emergency Preparedness Software

Emergency preparedness software is designed to help you create a plan and stay informed about emergencies, track and manage resources, communicate with others and more.

Using an emergency preparedness tool will help you be better prepared for an emergency by enabling you to plan ahead and make sure you have the information needed in case of an incident.

best crisis management software

From high-tech companies to small startups, a lot of businesses are looking for the best incident management software. What could be the possible reason?

Well, incidents are like a bug infestation, they just won’t go away on their own. No wonder incident management has become a critical part of every modern organization and can dictate the gap between success and failure.

“Hardrive crashes, security threats, software bugs, website downtimes, etc., are all critical incidents that can cripple your business’s productivity. While there is no way to undo incidents, you can always reduce their impact with efficient management.”

The best incident management tools are designed to help you track all issues in one place, promote team collaboration, encourage self-service, and understand the root cause of incidents with the help of reports.

In this blog, we will be discussing the various benefits, features of this tool and explore ten options that you can consider to meet your unique needs. Here we go!

What is Incident Management Software?

Incident management software helps you track all your past and ongoing incidents in one place. Agents can proactively resolve incidents, restore normal service as quickly as possible, and reduce their impact on business operations.

With the best incident management tool, you can even create a knowledge base to allow end-users to find relevant solutions at their own pace. On the other hand, managers can monitor the progress of incidents, gain better visibility with reports, and monitor the end-user experience from time to time.

Benefits of Incident Management Software

While incident management can seem like a daunting process to many, you need to pull up your socks and save your business. A proactive incident management system can offer you multiple benefits such as:

1. Improve Team Collaboration

Resolving incidents in a timely manner is not an individual’s job but requires a team effort. In order to understand the true nature or cause of an incident, you might need help from multiple team members, departments, or from an expert outside of your company.

The best incident management software helps you encourage team collaboration so that all relevant communications are in one place. For instance, you can see the status of an incident ticket, check who is working on what, and share notes that best describe the incident or the course of action.

2. Resolve Incidents Faster

If the resolution of an incident is delayed even for a short period of time, it can lead to drastic consequences for your business. For instance, if your website’s payment gateway is down even for a couple of hours, it can mean a loss of revenue and hundreds of unhappy customers.

With the right incident management system at your corner, you can track all incidents in one place. You can hold the right people accountable, track their performance, and ensure that every incident is resolved as per the set service level agreements (SLAs).

3. Prevent Future Incidents

We all know how even a small incident can cause multiple incidents – leading to a snowball effect. As soon as you eliminate a problem, you not only save your business from potential damage but also create a platform where you can learn from your mistakes.

For instance, with the incident ticket history, you can easily view past incidents, the steps taken to resolve them, recorded notes, and all other communications. With this information, you can conduct a root-cause analysis, dig deeper to find anomalies in the process, and prevent future incidents from taking place.

4. Take End-User Feedback

In order to further improve your incident management process, you must look to take feedback from everyone involved. This will help you guide your decision-making and make relevant changes to your process.

The best software for incident management comes with an in-built survey tool that you can use to take feedback from your end-users. For example, if a network downtime impacted your staff members, you can take feedback from them to understand how their work was hampered. Similarly, you can take feedback from customers to check whether they are facing a similar issue again or not.

Read More: Survey Question: 250+Examples, Types & Best Practices

Top Features of Best Software for Incident Management

To find the best incident management tool for your team, you need to first know which features to watch out for. Let’s explore some popular features of this tool.

Customers or staff members can use multiple channels to report an incident. For instance, while some might call your IT support team directly, others might drop an email. An incident management tool can help you track all the incident complaints across multiple channels in one place.

When your team has multiple incidents to cater to, you need to decide which ones need your utmost attention. With the ticket prioritization feature, you can organize incidents based on their priority such as “High”, “Normal”, or “Low.” This will help agents plan their day better and focus on top-priority tasks.

You need to create incident reports with an automated tool so that the accuracy of data is not compromised. Incident management systems offer insightful reports that can help managers make informed decisions. For example, you can track metrics such as average incident response time, average incident resolution time, open incidents, and much more.

Manual work is not only slow but can also lead to multiple errors. Incident tracking tools come with multiple automation features that help you stay on top of every ticket. For instance, you can automatically assign tickets to support agents, share automated email alerts, or develop chatbots to assist end-users with their basic concerns.

When someone comes to you to report an incident, do you note it down on sticky notes? Well, in that case, you need to adopt the digital route and create suitable forms. Web forms include multiple fields that someone can fill while reporting an incident such as the nature of the issue, time, department, etc. Once submitted, the form is automatically converted into a ticket and the agents can get all the relevant details they need to resolve an incident.

open source emergency management software

Climate change is gathering momentum and because of this, the world has witnessed some of the most devastating disasters recently. Tsunamis, cyclones, floods, earthquakes and even wildfires have destroyed lives and entire regions, of late. So can we look to open source software to help mitigate the effects of these disasters?

A disaster is a sudden accident or catastrophe, like an earthquake, a flood or a fire, which the community is incapable of coping with. It could be a natural or a man-made event, which kills people and destroys goods, services and the environment. In such circumstances, help from the government and information agencies is required.

In disaster risk management (DRM), financing and insurance are two major concerns for the government.

Natural disasters cause damage to human life and property. They result in severe losses. Some recent examples include the Kerala floods, the Northern California fires, hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and the volcanic eruption in Hawaii.

In a disaster situation, aid institutions must keep track of the victims’ needs and respond accordingly. While monitoring large scale disasters, massive amounts of heterogeneous data gets collected and that must be managed efficiently by aid agencies. During a disaster, if information is not handled well, help can get delayed or become ineffective, leading to the potential waste of resources or in uneven aid distribution. FOSS can help manage disasters, and has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of aid agencies.

During disasters, effective information systems are required because they can provide timely access to comprehensive, relevant and reliable solutions to victims. FOSS for disaster management is in high demand because of its lower cost and higher efficiency.

FOSS in disaster management

The Asia-Pacific region, with 60 per cent of the world’s population, is highly vulnerable to disasters. Between 2002 and 2011, 40 per cent of all reported disasters (1,524) occurred in Asia, causing 63 per cent of all global disaster deaths (669,263), and causing 48 per cent of global damage (costing US$ 691 billion).

FOSS helps the disaster risk management (DRM) team in the following ways:

As an example, Google came to the rescue during the Uttarakhand floods of 2013 by developing apps to help rescue teams. It launched a crisis map of the flood-hit state to provide quick information on the places affected, relief centres, medical centres and road closures. It also activated a Person Finder tool—a Web based application that helped feed in the names of the people one was looking for, as well as share information about somebody who had been found or rescued. When there was a match for a person being searched for, it was displayed on this app.

For decades, governments and NGOs have relied on private sector solutions to gather and interpret emergency data for disaster response. But, nowadays, they are depending upon cheaper open source technology.

Proprietary software does everything, from providing images and location based on the Geographic Information System (GIS) to centralising government generated data on a command centre dashboard during a crisis. Such solutions have been around for decades but are expensive.

FOSS: Helping disaster victims

In recent years, especially after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, many cities and NGOs are turning to open source technology, which generally doesn’t involve a licence fee to download the software. FOSS disaster management systems are playing an increasingly important role in the rescue and rehabilitation sector as they offer cost-effective coordination for agencies to respond to large scale disasters.

In cases of man-made crises or natural disasters, a range of organisations, websites, open source tools, mobile applications, etc, is available to the public. Some of the FOSS software used in the US during disasters are listed below.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely deployed in disaster management. Managing heterogeneous embedded devices like different processors and memories, as well as operating systems such as embedded Linux, iOS, Android, along with heterogeneous protocols is very important, to provide efficient solutions for the various challenges in disaster management.

HFOSS plays a key role in disaster management

Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (HFOSS) represents the application of FOSS to fix the problems faced by victims in disaster situations.

FOSS helps to save lives and victims by responding to the following:

Some popular HFOSS solutions used in disaster management are:

There are many more institutions contributing to FOSS. These communities work together effectively to provide better software. Most of these products are based on open source platforms and are built from open source software such as Apache, Linux, PHP, Python, MySQL, etc.

The advantages of HFOSS disaster management solutions are:

Sahana is FOSS that aims to provide comprehensive solutions to information management in relief operations, recovery and rehabilitation. It ensures:

Sahana was developed by a group of volunteers in Sri Lanka during the Indian Ocean tsunami.

InaSAFE is used in Asia for disaster management. It was developed jointly by developers in Indonesia, Australia and the World Bank. It produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities. It provides a simple but rigorous way to combine data from scientists, local governments and communities to provide insights into the likely impacts of future disasters.

Even Facebook is assisting disaster victims to a great extent. Its disaster map provides information about where populations are located, how they are moving and where they are checking in for safety, during a natural disaster.

Disaster management and Big Data

Big Data offers new options for natural disaster management, and can help to visualise, analyse and predict natural disasters. For example, satellite remote sensing technology helps to assess the damage caused by a disaster, can forecast storms, and so on.

Big Data can help to save humans from all kinds of disasters. It can coordinate relief efforts for those who are the most vulnerable. Both crowd-sourcing of data and social media data are contributing greatly in disaster management. Government agencies, though, have been slow in launching their own crowd-sourcing platforms for disaster management.

Social media platforms, including Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr, have been contributing significantly in disaster management. Geo-tagged social media data can be collected by streaming the harvest from the APIs provided by the social media companies. Mobile GPS has emerged as an effective means of gathering mobile sensing data because it can be used to detect human mobility and behaviour during large scale natural disasters. Predictive analytics can be a powerful tool for natural disaster management. Sensor data is usually the major source for developing an early warning system.

incident command software

ICR: Fire & Rescue™ is designed to aid Fire Services across the country in their operations. We have built a simple and easy to use “app” that provide incredible functionality in all areas of your team’s operations. With our software applications we can deliver fast, focused & reliable information into the hands of your team as and when they need it. Paperless information management, contact directory management, checklists and pre fire planning support are just some of the features that ensure your team are ready to handle whatever incident is thrown at them.

ICR™’s user friendly mobile applications ensures your team have everything they need, when they are called to respond to an incident or emergency. This user friendly ‘app’ combines the functionality of traditional Incident Command Board with the intuitiveness of an application. Action Cards™ such as Standard Operating Guidelines, Aid Memoires or Pre Fire Plans, ensure your team responds to each and every incident in a consistent & effective manner. In addition, the ICR™ whiteboards connect teams online and quickly gets them up to speed with live incident data. This data is also available on their mobile, pc or laptop.

Seamlessly capture & record incident reports, before sending them to an online archive. With ICR: Fire and Rescue™ reporting post incident has never been easier. Our App delivers auto-generated incident and analysis reports, as well as archived paperless reports and checklists to suit your business’s needs. Paperwork is minimised, all reports actions are time and date stamped as well as being easily retrievable.

Provide Reasoned Justification for Actions

Incident Commanders can provide reasoned justification for their decisions when responding to incidents. Capture Decision Logs, Tactical Modes, Dynamic Risk Assessments, Nominal Role Boards, Access Procedures, Aide Memoires etc. All available at the touch of a button on your Incident Commander’s Tablet.

View Contemporaneous Decision Logs

The Incident Commanders Decision Log can be viewed through any internet enabled device by Sector Commanders, Senior Officers and the Incident Command Mobile Unit. Data is displayed live on other tablets, PC’s or Laptops subject to connectivity.

Automatically Compiled Decision Log

ICR: Fire & Rescue™ automatically compiles a decision log and incident timeline justifying the decision making process of the command team throughout the incident. Ideal for use in active monitoring, post incident debrief & training also.

Mobility and Accessibility

Information has been moved from the vehicle, closer to the incident ground and into the hands of the incident commander. Handheld devices are more accessible and user friendly. As a result, interaction with them is more frequent, intuitive and consistent.

Making Jobs Easier and Safer

Officers can easily refer to standard operating guidelines (SOGs) through the app. The instant access to a library of information supports the decision making process when handling more unusual incidents, as well as helping to achieve compliance with procedures.

The incident commander and command support officer are now better informed, with the ability to access information at the click of a button. Remote access means that officers at the station can access up to date Incident progress, as well as photographs directly from the scene.

More frequent progress updates

App prompts alert the support officer to select a tactical mode. Throughout the incident, these prompts ensure more accurate information and updates are fed back to the control room at frequent intervals.

Automatic time stamping helps map out the workflow of the incident, giving more accurate and complete information, should a review be necessary. Supporting images in context enable a much richer record of events.

ICR™ acts as a rich resource and information hub that can be accessed on the fire ground. Having access to user manuals, databases and plans at the scene of an incident is invaluable.

Continuous improvement and training

The information captured provides valuable training material, especially when unusual incidents occur and lessons are learned.

Android tablets are relatively inexpensive compared to the rugged laptops that the fire service needed to maintain. Instead, the incident commanders have Samsung mobile devices with protective cases on their person at the fire ground.