Redefining GIS in Emergency Management

Hello! And welcome to my first #emergencymanagementGIS article. For those I have yet to meet, my name is Carrie Speranza, and I am Esri 's new director of Emergency Management Solutions. I've been in emergency management for almost 20 years in both the public and private sectors and in operational and strategic positions. I am a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) and have served in leadership roles in several professional associations and organizations. But despite these industry-specific qualifications, if you look at my résumé, you'll notice that I have never been a geographer, cartographer, or geographic information system (GIS) analyst. If I'm being transparent, I'm still in the process of taking the Introduction to ArcGIS course online, and I have yet to create a map or dashboard.

However, I have been in a position of making critical, time-sensitive, life-saving decisions that required the use of GIS technology. So as an executive-level end user, I have practical experience to speak from.

Why Esri, Why GIS, and Why Does That Matter?

As emergency managers, each of us understands that the root of all risk is location. Where you are is directly related to the hazards and threats that occur, the degree of social inequities experienced, accessibility to health care, availability of nutritional food and clean water, the quality of public education, and the list goes on. In fact, the question of where is the first one we ask as emergency managers: where is the incident happening? and then: what is it like there?

In addition to where, geospatial science can lead us toward answering the why and so what of nearly any incident that occurs. It's the why and so what that political or C-suite leadership asks us all the time, so getting to those answers is what matters most. But to get to the why and so what, we first need to address a common misperception of GIS in emergency management. After that, we'll begin to see the greater application of the science in all phases, all mission areas, and all components of our practice.

The Misperception of a Tradecraft

Let's face it: The majority of emergency managers use their GIS capability reactively.

In nearly every organization I've worked, GIS is ramped up in the days/hours leading up to a known event (e.g., special event, hurricane) or immediately after an incident occurs to gain better geographic situational awareness. And during an activation, the GIS analysts report into the situation unit of the planning section in the Emergency Operations Center's (EOC) incident command structure—where, according to FEMA 's National Incident Management System (NIMS), "they produce maps."

In other mission areas, many agencies use GIS in the development of their hazard mitigation plan’s risk assessment for hazard mapping. And some have even expanded the use to include daily situational awareness dashboards and field-based data collection through Esri's ArcGIS Survey123 solution.

But few agencies have fully integrated ArcGIS beyond situational awareness and response operations.

To put it simply, we like to use GIS analysts and the technology to create maps and dashboards as a quick-and-easy solution during time-sensitive missions.

Which means… the analysts and the technology are vastly underutilized resources that we must tap into more earnestly.

Redefining GIS for Emergency Management

Instead, what if I said your GIS analyst is your frontline intelligence analyst.

And their ability to conduct intelligence analysis applies to preparedness, mitigation, recovery, and resilience—not just response operations and situational awareness.

As curators of data-rich maps and dashboards, these intelligence analysts collect data, organize it, create a story, and disseminate it for decision-making purposes. They often have access to your jurisdiction's or organization's entire geospatial data library—which inherently makes them pretty powerful data hubs. And much like traditional intelligence analysts, GIS analysts are constantly searching for data feeds, identifying trends, analyzing what it all means, and assessing the impacts of what they're monitoring—spatially and relationally—to make a visual story about their analysis to share it with you for consumption. Their knowledge, skills, and abilities expand far beyond cartography and "producing maps," and the results of their work inform some of our most critical decisions.

But redefining GIS in emergency management doesn't end there.

What if I said your GIS analysts are also part of your alert, watch, and warn function as well as your future planning capability? The technology they use has made tremendous advancements over the last several years—in fact, it's gone mobile—and the systems they use can automatically notify the analyst when triggers and thresholds are met that you've identified as a priority.

Let's play this redefined role out in a scenario.

As the director of emergency management, you've tasked your GIS analyst with creating a dashboard that monitors data points specific to heat waves. On that board, you have visual displays of the three-day weather forecast, the geographic locations of historically recurring heat islands, current data on the health-care system's capacity, cooling center locations and building status, utility/power infrastructure status, and population statistics—highlighting the geographic location of your most vulnerable residents.?

Once the weather forecast predicts an impending heat wave, the thresholds set in the dashboard are triggered and your GIS analyst is alerted via email or text to monitor the board for changes. The analyst follows your organization’s alert, watch, and warn standard operating procedure and shares this new information with your leadership and operations teams for decision-making purposes.

Using ArcGIS, your analyst then conducts an assessment of the event’s cascading impacts through data analysis and modeling, which helps the entire team understand what will be impacted, who will be impacted, where resources should go, and how bad it will get (i.e., like an intelligence analyst). These anticipated impacts inform your activation level, public notification strategy, the staging of resources, your readiness posture for days and weeks to come (i.e., future planning), and the essential government services you need to ramp up or down for delivery to your residents.

As the event continues, your GIS analyst deploys Esri’s ArcGIS Survey123 to all response personnel via a mobile link to collect real-time data from the field. This data not only reflects the current situation but also serves as the mechanism to inform the command staffs’ decision-making processes. The data loop within the ArcGIS system continually updates your situational awareness dashboard in the EOC, incident maps, and incident management system, which, in turn, informs your response posture, logistics needs, public information strategy, etc.

This short scenario clearly demonstrates that the use case for GIS is so much more than just producing maps in the situation unit. In fact, what it shows is that GIS is a mission-critical capability.

The array of GIS solutions available to ArcGIS users includes data analytics, trend analysis, and predictive analytics—which give us the so what we're solving for. And other scenarios could just as easily describe GIS's strategic application to grants management, hazard mitigation project scoping, community resilience planning, social equity analysis, and climate change preparedness, which I plan to cover in future blogs to keep the conversation going.

Here's the best part about redefining GIS for emergency management: Your GIS analyst likely already has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to do everything described in the scenario above. But it is only with your support, as the leader, that their role can be elevated from "just producing maps," to using GIS technology to inform long-term strategic decisions.

Competing Priorities

It is widely acknowledged that emergency management organizations are inadequately resourced to fulfill their unique mission set. You are being tasked to manage not only traditional emergencies but also atypical emerging trends and threats (e.g., the opioid epidemic, homelessness, and gun violence) that have not historically been led by the industry, regardless of sector or level of government. Your resources are spread thin, and the to-do list keeps getting longer.

It's often because of these competing priorities that most organizations only partially staff/fund their GIS unit, and in many cases, borrow analysts from other organizations during activations because they don't have their own. These circumstances make it difficult to get the most out of your technology investments, and it makes the long-term strategic use of GIS a significant programmatic challenge.

But what if we continue the cycle of underfunding and under-resourcing our GIS units because we haven't fully understood the power of the analyst or the pieces of intelligence they manage? What if this cycle continues simply because we haven't seen the application of GIS for the so what, using data analytics, trend analysis, and predictive analytics? And what if we weren't aware that the science can be applied to every single threat and hazard that we experience? Without being exposed to all the technology can do for your program, it becomes a leadership challenge to invest even more into your GIS capability – and the cycle of underfunding and under-resourcing continues.?

Invite Them to the Table

By redefining GIS as an intelligence, watch and warn, and future planning capability within emergency management, it's easier to see GIS’s unique contribution to decision-making processes beyond the situation unit. And it also serves to highlight just how underutilized GIS is in many organizations.

Inviting your GIS analyst to the leadership table will help you—and practically force you—to solve problems through a different lens. Their analytical skills and geospatial mindset will inherently motivate and inspire you to think differently and to ask different questions. They'll help you break down process barriers in information sharing and data management so that you and your elected officials can make decisions faster and more effectively.

So, what can you do? Emergency managers must empower their GIS analyst by inviting them to the table. Encourage them to speak up when they see data and trends of concern, and support their progressive and proactive use of the technology in all phases of emergency management – tactically, operationally, and strategically. If you’re concerned the conversation will turn to the technology's hardware and software components, or specific GIS technical workflows—ask them to elevate their briefing skills for a nonuser audience. They are more than capable of adjusting their approach.

And in addition to inviting them to the table, perhaps the most important thing you can do is to ask your GIS analyst for frequent demonstrations of new ArcGIS solutions. The suite of ArcGIS tools and solutions continues to evolve, so make sure you ask for demonstrations often. And be sure to ask for their specific ideas on how to integrate those solutions into your program, across all mission areas.

What's Next

Rethinking GIS and our misperceptions of the tradecraft lay the groundwork for what's next.

We've covered the where, so what, and why of elevating and empowering GIS in your programs; next, we'll talk about how in a future three-part blog series:

• The first blog, How to Build Your Emergency Management GIS Program, will examine the various ways emergency management organizations can get access to ArcGIS—particularly if the organization doesn't already have a license agreement. I'll also provide a rundown of the various ArcGIS products you should ask about to build specific emergency management solutions. Additionally, I'll go over federal preparedness grant programs where GIS and the analysts are considered eligible for a grant.
• The second blog, Questions to Ask Your GIS Analyst, will provide a list of suggested questions emergency management leaders should be asking their GIS analyst to get the most out of ArcGIS technology.
• Finally, Recruiting and Training Emergency Management GIS Personnel will go over the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that your GIS analyst should bring to the table, which may help if you're in the process of hiring a new analyst (or need to train a current one). For smaller agencies with limited resources, I'll also point you in the direction of free online training that is already available to help boost your in-house GIS capability regardless of how proficient you are with the technology.

In the end, my goal is to provide you with tools, tricks, and how-to’s that will help you better understand GIS technology and how it can benefit your processes, plans, and operations. I will also share success stories, showcasing how other programs are using the technology.

Interested in learning more about Esri's emergency management solutions?

Check out this site: GIS in Disaster Management | Emergency Management Operations (esri.com)