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

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.