Local Government

OCA can assist large local government incident response, emergency coordination centres and disaster / emergency response centres with the following types of incidents or uses:

Business as usual incident management
Major hazards and emergency management
OHS&E incidents
Capability matching and resource deployment
Crisis communication

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Requests for assistance	During emergency Local councils play a central role as first or second responder to requests for assistance. One of the primary challenges in fulfilling these requests is ensuring that your resources deal with the highest priority incidents first, and that resources don't waste time being deployed to the same incident more than once, or travelling unnecessarily when a closer resource could attend to the request. OCA can bring in requests for assistance from multiple sources in real time through the OCA Connect tool, and allows you to view the entire history of a request until the job is properly closed. OCA can be used to allocate any resources to requests or incidents be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Not only can you assign resources to your own staff within the system, but you can also send external requests for assistance to third party agencies using the OCA communications gateway. Resources can be tracked and allocated by many ways - geographically, by resource availability, by capability, by type, or by cost. You can also enter costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily track the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. OCA's simple data management tools allow you to create as many types of request that you need, including custom forms and workflows.
Deploy & track resources	You may have varied resources that need to be committed to an incident. A council ranger may be responsible for responding to business as usual noise complaints, a maintenance team may be responsible for maintenance of potholes on local roads, or you may have an emergency response team that needs to co-ordinate a range of local council resources in the event of a major hazard. OCA allows you to mobilise and track resources in relation to incidents, or get a total view of what is happening from multiple tracking tools. The OCA is open architecture in relation to GIS information, moving or otherwise. Human resource and asset resource information can consume information from third party GIS tracking software systems quickly and easily.
Get a real-time geospatial picture	Local governments are responsible for a variety of geospatial information and have often been early adopters of GIS technology. It is useful to be able to see information visually through a GIS interface, allowing key decision makers to make decisions more efficiently. Geospatial software tools are commonly used to assist in emergency services planning, response and recovery functions. The 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. The 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.
Managing social media	The requests module in the 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 the 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).
Business as usual incidents	Why have one system to deal with your business as usual incidents and one to deal with major emergencies? The OCA system can handle all types of incidents whether they are noise, road issues, building complaints, animal, a burst water main, waste services of any other local government incident function.
Share information with state government agencies	Local government organisations need to work with emergency services organisation during major hazards, particularly around requests for assistance from local constituents. The OCA can assist in planning and response for such incidents including co-ordination of shared resources with civilian agencies via the OCA Connect interoperability tool. The OCA interoperability Connect tool 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 our open architecture.
Get mobile	Local government can involve field response - from rangers, property inspections, and local government resources. The 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 such as task and requests for assistance, it can also consume information from external information sources whether they be roaming GIS tracking systems, tracking resources or personnel. The OCA allows you bring multiple sources together, and access that information in real time-in the field.
Track decision making	Local governments are often under pressure post major incidents in terms how they assisted in planning for and responding to major hazards. Royal Commissions are a common instrument to examine what happened and why decisions were made by personnel in emergency services agencies 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.
Security	It is important to have the confidence that the information and data within local government systems is reliable 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 have clearance to the appropriate levels. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Conform with AIIMS 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	Why have one tool for crisis communications, and one for incident management? 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 CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) 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.