Crisis and Emergency Coordination Centres

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OCA can assist the following organisations / roles:

State Government Emergency Operations Centres
Departmental Emergency Coordination Centres
State Crisis Coordination Centres
Local Government Emergency Coordination Centres
Crisis and Incident Command Rooms

With the following types of incidents or uses:

Emergency management
Disaster response
Major hazards
OHS&E incidents
Capability matching and resource deployment
Crisis communication

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Total situational awareness and information sharing with multiple agencies	A key role of emergency or crisis coordination centres is to coordinate information from a range of sources. In an all hazards context, you can have information coming in from multiple sources, agencies and formats, and you're also sending out information to multiple agencies. OCA's multi-media inbox and 2-way communication platform makes it fast and easy to assess, collate, categorise and distribute information, and its workflow engine can automate much of the manual processing of information and communications. OCA's flexible dashboard system makes it easy to quickly configure different views of key information for different stakeholders, automatically blending and filtering information from a wide range of sources and formats. This allows for rich and real-time situation reporting, with information in the right context for the person viewing it, saving you time and giving decision-makers the accurate information they need, when they need it. The OCA Connect solution for interoperability also allows you to share any piece of information (events, assets, resources, contacts, reports etc.) with other relevant stakeholders, providing rich information securely and in real time. OCA Connect is also a directory service that connects other agencies with each other in a highly intelligent and automated way. Plus you can share information between OCA or non-OCA systems via the OCA's open architecture.
Track decision making	Emergency/crisis coordination centres are often under pressure following major incidents to explain how they planned for and responded to the hazards and their interaction with other agencies during a crisis. Royal Commissions are a common instrument to examine what happened and why decisions were made by personnel in such a context. The OCA's configurable audit logging, decision matrix allows you track why decisions were made, and see what information was at hand. You can export all of the information in a major incident - logs, reports, any piece of information - at the touch of a button rather than spending weeks or months pulling together reports, giving you a rapid and cost efficient understanding of what happened, when.
Strategic understanding of resource commitments	Coordination centres need to have a high level of situational awareness including resources deployed, from a strategic level: how many responders are involved in the incident, what is the overall impact to property and human life, how much has the incident cost to date. The information is needed in a format that assists senior decision makers to make the right decisions about actions to take. OCA's resource management tools can complement operational dispatch systems by providing tactical and strategic mobilisation and tracking of resources. Human resource and asset resource information can be integrated with third party software systems, and capabilities to deal with incidents can be assessed on the fly, giving you a complete executive view of what is happening from multiple tracking tools, quickly and easily.
Requests for assistance	Requests for assistance for emergency services agencies come from the public, intra agency or extra agency during a major incident. A coordination centre's role may be in having visibility of the total statistics of requests so that senior personnel can assist at a strategic level. OCA can bring in requests for assistance from multiple sources through the OCA Connect tool, and allows you to view request for assistance information from a strategic point of view - e.g. total number of assistance request, total financial impact and whether you have the resources to be able to deal with them.
A geospatial picture	Coordination centres often they have a broader interaction across multiple agencies, and in that context it is useful to be able to see information visually through a GIS interface, allowing decision makers to make decisions more efficiently. Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. The OCA geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communications to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key workers in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders.
Managing media and social media	A function of many coordination centres is to get the word out, often through a public affairs unit. The requests module in OCA can also be used to deal with media requests in a structured and co-ordinated manner. In some instances, you may need to follow a particular protocol in terms of your response, particularly if the incident involves injuries or casualties, and the OCA workflow tool can assist you in doing this. You can also use OCA communication gateway to send information out via email, SMS, voice, fax, and social media including Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources to any variety of recipients (public or internal).
Get mobile	Crisis / emergency coordination centres can be called into action at any time, in many different types of situations. Not everyone is going to be accessing information via desktop computers. Often centre personnel need to access information via mobile devices outside of normal working times, or while deployed to the field, or even another country. OCA is optimised for delivery across multiple devices, including Blackberries, iPhones, Android phones as well as a variety of tablet devices. Whilst OCA is good at distributing information, it can also consume information from external information sources whether they be roaming GIS tracking systems, tracking resources or personnel. OCA allows you bring multiple sources together, and access that information in real time-in the field.
Security	It's important to have the confidence that the information and data you rely on is authentic and tamper proof, particularly if you end up facing a Royal Commission. OCA Incident Manager is the only incident management product in the world to be certified by the Defence Signals Directorate, to the internationally recognised Common Criteria EAL2+ security rating - (ISO/IEC 15408). The OCA's multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu with data centres that meet the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. You can also host the application yourself, and we have experience in setting up hardware in classified environments. Key staff also has clearance to the appropriate levels. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Conform with AIIMS, ICS or other standards	The Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS) is a common framework in Australian emergency services, providing a role based structure for responding to incidents. OCA can assist you in conforming with AIIMS or any other standard or methodology. Users of the system can be put in single or multiple roles. Roles can be configured into teams, or to match any structure. With OCA's highly configurable dashboards, information within the system can be set up to give roles different views of that information. Senior personnel may only have access to information at a high level where they need to make high level decisions. Those at an operational level may see more detail and use the information in the system in a more tactical context.
Integrated alerting	The OCA alerting platform is totally integrated in OCA. Throughout OCA, you can send information via the OCA Communication gateway via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML - conforming with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard. Send out emergency warnings, co-ordinate evacuations, keep key stakeholders informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications of emergency plans or operating procedures. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools.
Geospatial information & decision making	Geospatial software tools are commonly used to assist in emergency services planning, response and recovery functions. OCA GIS capability goes across the entire OCA system, utilising Google Maps. All pieces of information can be automatically GEO-coded. Assets and resources can be plotted. Incidents, sub incidents, logs, reports can also be plotted. Communications can be sent using the Geospatial tools. OCA capability is not designed to replace a specialised mapping tool, but can be used to integrate and complement the GIS work that has been done by a mapping unit. OCA integrates with GeoRSS, KML, CAP and ESRI among other mapping standards and systems.
Crisis severity	OCA deals with different levels of crises, and can be easily configured to match your crisis matrix. When an incident moves from low to high severity, change how you might respond to the incident.
Simple to use	When emergency or crisis coordination centres are stood up, multiple personnel can be involved and seconded to assist. It's vital that they can use the tools they need to, quickly and easily. OCA has been built specifically with this in mind; it is highly usable and easy to come up to speed within minutes, without requiring lengthy training.

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