About Emergency Managers and Their Tools: What Emergency Managers Want From a Business Perspective

Background

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Inspector General (IG) of the United States made 38 recommendations to the Director of FEMA. These recommendations highlighted the need for better disaster preparedness, improved emergency information management systems, and enhanced multi-agency coordination. The March 2006 report also emphasized the valuable role a robust training and evaluation program plays in an enhanced emergency preparedness posture (U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, 2006). Emergency Managers embraced the recommendations and aimed to improve performance through enhanced training and exercises. Training, however, comes with several challenges centered around cost, manpower, and resources. A single full-scale exercise can cost upwards of $100,000 (T. Johnson, personal communication, February 4, 2016) and requires the extraction of representatives from their daily jobs; overtime and substitute staffing required for 24/7 Emergency Operations Center (EOC) operations increases the cost even further. Through prior research, two of these authors identified a need for a virtual training EOC, which allows Emergency Managers to participate in exercises and manage crises from any computer, in any location (Nikolai et al., 2009; Nikolai et al., 2010; Nikolai, 2014; Nikolai et al., 2015; SimEOC, 2016). The product of this research is called SimEOC, which is derived from simulated EOC.

Over the course of seven years, we received two funding grants from the National Science Foundation to design and develop SimEOC, a virtual EOC (Award Numbers CNS-0855164.and CNS-1405912. The next step was to test the commercialization viability of SimEOC through the NSF I-Corps program (Award number IIP-1550535).