Re-Thinking Situational Awareness: Optimizing Emergency Management with Comprehensive Operational Awareness
As both technology and environmental factors rapidly evolve, the requirements for effective situational awareness in emergency management have significantly expanded. The traditional concept of situational awareness often centers on threat and hazard detection and incident response coordination. However, to unlock the full potential of situational awareness capabilities, organizations should consider the broader applications of their technology and how they align with their missions.
Defining Situational Awareness
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines situational awareness as:
"Within a volume of time and space, the perception of an enterprise’s security posture and its threat environment; the comprehension/meaning of both taken together (risk); and the projection of their status into the near future.”
This definition underscores that situational awareness, powered by real-time data and advanced technology, is essential for accurately detecting and effectively responding to emergencies and disruptions – an ever-growing importance in our evolving and highly interdependent environment. However, beyond crisis and risk mitigation and response, situational awareness offers far-reaching benefits when applied to overall operations, yielding a more comprehensive view known as "operational awareness."
The Shift to Operational Awareness
Advanced operational awareness capabilities provide a real-time, ongoing view of operations and resources across an organization that is deeply integrated across its existing technologies, personnel, and workflows. This holistic approach enables emergency management teams and personnel to visualize the current operational landscape, facilitating proactive and reactive decision-making.
Instead of only focusing on emergencies, a system emphasizing operational awareness continually monitors activities to optimize performance and facilitate collaboration and communication. A real-time, accurate (or near-accurate) understanding of the operating environment substantially decreases the time necessary to take action, prevent or mitigate emerging hazards, and augments a shared understanding among stakeholders in the current environment, thus enhancing the efficacy of decision-making. This proactive stance enhances all aspects of incident and emergency management.
Key Benefits of Real-Time Operational Awareness
The evolution of data and technology has made it possible to provide organizations with superior operational awareness integrated across an organization. Benefits include:
Continuous Monitoring: Real-time monitoring allows for immediate insights into risk, response, and performance, helping maintain an organization’s stability and resilience.
Improved Response Time: Streamlined workflows and aligned dashboards enable faster access to situational data, ensuring disruptions can be addressed promptly and limiting impact.
Enhanced Coordination: Integrating operational awareness systems into collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack improves interdepartmental communication and streamlines coordination during routine operations and crises.
Beyond Technology: Addressing Organizational Change
Over the course of the past few decades, organizations have increasingly relied upon technology to augment human capabilities and, when possible, replace low-skill human labor. This has freed workers to focus on more complex projects and tasks. However, historically, technology investments have focused on solving a single challenge—for instance, the need for an accurate asset inventory led to the creation of multiple inventory solutions. The need to share short communications among co-workers led to the creation of MS Teams and Slack. Each of these inventions led to the betterment of the overall work effort. However, they exist in “silos” and rely upon workers to serve as the bridge between them. As these technologies and software solutions stack up over time, not only do organizations tend to sit on massive tech stacks that are not leveraged to their full potential, but workers increasingly struggle to monitor each of them, capture the data they produce, and complete the mental analytics necessary to have useful information or achieve their broader efforts. This legacy approach has become untenable.
Rather than getting rid of many systems and investing in one new “comprehensive solution,” which undoubtedly will not provide all of the nuanced functionality of the existing individual solutions anyway, leveraging the ability to integrate systems together is far less expensive and ultimately a faster and more effective approach. Additionally, it substantially reduces the need for training and can provide far greater functionality. In the era of “open API” (and when not ‘open’ at least the era of ‘easily created API), this approach is one that every organization should consider before investing in any additional software. We often say, “First, understand what you have and what it can do.” Few are leveraging the full power of their existing software solutions, and most aren’t aware of the capabilities that each has. That is the first step to establishing an effective operational awareness capability.
The second and perhaps even more critical need is to ensure that every technology is aligned with the mission, goals, functions, and responsibilities of the organization. Aligning existing technology investments with data, personnel, processes, and workflows across an organization or even an entire ecosystem of stakeholders with a shared mission enables cost-effective and comprehensive operational awareness.
When technology is integrated without considering existing procedures, roles, and responsibilities, its effectiveness is significantly reduced. A misalignment can cause frustration and inefficiencies. Many organizations are unaware of the inherent capabilities of their technology, including AI and ML capabilities, which are becoming more prominent and powerful every day. Deploying an effective operational awareness system demands a strategic and comprehensive approach, including:
Clear Objectives: Identify Essential Elements of Information (EEIs) and associated information exchange pathways and align them with mission-critical functions.
Governance: Establish clear SOPs for data handling, analysis, and reporting to ensure consistency and accountability.
Human-Centered Approach: Prioritize training, feedback, and role definition to facilitate seamless interaction between technology and personnel, improving stakeholder engagement and adoption.
Effective Investment in Operational Awareness
Investing in new technology products to achieve comprehensive situational awareness is costly and often not optimally integrated. However, when implemented as part of an overarching operational awareness strategy, leveraging an organization's existing technology investments is a more cost-effective and optimized approach. Organizations can transform situational awareness into a core competency that benefits their mission by aligning technology with strategic goals, personnel engagement, and clearly defined procedures.
Bent Ear Solutions (BES) challenges organizations to rethink situational awareness as part of a broader operational awareness initiative. Our approach enhances emergency response capabilities and strengthens everyday operations, improving resilience and efficiency. Our proactive and continuous methodology ensures that organizations are well-prepared to respond effectively to both routine disruptions and unexpected crises.
