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Yeah, I have one of those introductory Incident Command System certificates floating around somewhere, too. The Incident Command System contains guidelines to

by ekidd 5y ago

Yeah, I have one of those introductory Incident Command System certificates floating around somewhere, too. The Incident Command System contains guidelines to help different organizations work together in an emergency. You might need the fire service, or police, or hazmat, or EMS, possibly across multiple jurisdictions. If I recall correctly, ICS bans all those "10-4" radio codes, standardizes job roles, etc. And it contains rules for scaling the temporary organization up and transfering leadership as necessary. Overall, it seems well-suited to real-world emergency response. And the training materials recommended using it in non-emergency situations, too, such as large parades. The idea was that major emergencies are rare, but it's worth getting practice with more common events. I'm not quite sure how well the ideas behind ICS applies to IT outages. Most outages occur within a single organization, so there's less need to coordinate with outsiders. But some of the advice for scaling the response team and handling leadership transfers might be very useful.

nucleardog 5y ago
It's not just different organizations working together, I'd call it more... working with what you have. In the event of an earthquake the disaster staging area isn't going to have a nice assortment of police, fire, EMS, and other employees--they're going to get whoever was in the area at the time and need to try and organize and allocate them to do the most good with what they have. Not everyone is going to be going back out to do the job they started the day with. In that sense I could still see some value around the ideas of organizing based on whoever actually shows up when the 3AM call goes out, adjusting roles on the fly as the situation evolves, and assigning out specific people responsible for updating management, interfacing with vendors, etc. And I think it puts people in the right mindset to do all that. But yeah, I wouldn't like... plan on sending all my staff out for ICS training next week or anything. I think there'd be some value in sending a couple people responsible for creating and implementing your disaster planning to take it though--there are a lot of good things you could copy, some you could modify, and some you could throw away to make a pretty damn good IT-oriented response procedure. And yeah, as far as I've seen our city actually uses ICS any time the emergency operations centre is activated. That's whenever there's a large-scale emergency that requires more centralized coordination, but also sometimes just if there's a large event that requires coordination (e.g., a festival with 100k people showing up at the beach). It's not just for practice, but because it's just a system that everyone's already familiar with that can respond to the situation if it evolves. Nobody needs to make the call that "we're switching into emergency mode now" and stop everything to reorganize, they simply respond.

by ekidd 5y ago

nucleardog 5y ago

It's not just different organizations working together, I'd call it more... working with what you have. In the event of an earthquake the disaster staging area isn't going to have a nice assortment of police, fire, EMS, and other employees--they're going to get whoever was in the area at the time and need to try and organize and allocate them to do the most good with what they have. Not everyone is going to be going back out to do the job they started the day with. In that sense I could still see some value around the ideas of organizing based on whoever actually shows up when the 3AM call goes out, adjusting roles on the fly as the situation evolves, and assigning out specific people responsible for updating management, interfacing with vendors, etc. And I think it puts people in the right mindset to do all that. But yeah, I wouldn't like... plan on sending all my staff out for ICS training next week or anything. I think there'd be some value in sending a couple people responsible for creating and implementing your disaster planning to take it though--there are a lot of good things you could copy, some you could modify, and some you could throw away to make a pretty damn good IT-oriented response procedure. And yeah, as far as I've seen our city actually uses ICS any time the emergency operations centre is activated. That's whenever there's a large-scale emergency that requires more centralized coordination, but also sometimes just if there's a large event that requires coordination (e.g., a festival with 100k people showing up at the beach). It's not just for practice, but because it's just a system that everyone's already familiar with that can respond to the situation if it evolves. Nobody needs to make the call that "we're switching into emergency mode now" and stop everything to reorganize, they simply respond.