How a Situational Awareness Data Platform Can Inform Emergency Preparedness
Blog: The Tibco Blog
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Situational awareness is a core success principle of the intelligence community (IC). IC professionals trained in situational awareness and specific environments can better comprehend the impacts of changes to that environment and even predict possible outcomes for improved strategic decision-making.
Historically, gaining situational awareness and projecting outcomes has been a manual and labor-intensive process, requiring large teams of analysts and large budget allocations—such as protecting homeland security or supporting forward military operations. But modern technology has shifted this paradigm, enabling situational awareness to be leveraged across multiple problem sets at a nominal cost.
The Example of COVID-19
The first case of COVID-19 was reported in China on December 31, 2019. On January 20, 2020, we had our first reported case in the US, but it wasn’t until April that we began to see consistent reporting on tests, cases, and deaths. It took even longer before we began to understand the pandemic’s impacts on our local communities.
Much of the data necessary for emergency preparedness was publicly available ahead of this crisis, but state and local government agencies often did not have the technology in place to monitor the threat. Situational awareness in the context of COVID-19 might involve the following data integrated into a modern data analytics platform:
- Vulnerable population data to inform the number of people most at-risk geographically
- Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System to geographically track infectious diseases in the U.S.
- Hospital capacity data to provide the number of hospital beds geographically available at any given time
Integrating the above publicly available data-sets allows for a single view of potential pandemics and other health risks, but most importantly, it enables government agencies to create informed preparedness plans. A situational awareness data platform gives emergency managers the tools they need to be proactive and stay ahead of the proverbial curve.
“Having a situational awareness data platform can inform government personnel the instant something happens, predict its potential growth, and help monitor the event in real time.” — Natural Disasters and Civil Unrest
Situational Data Platform in Action
Emergency managers are called to action during any natural or man-made disaster from tornadoes to forest fires to civil unrest. A situational awareness data platform can inform first responders the instant something happens, predict its potential growth, and help leadership monitor the event in real time.
Situational awareness for all kinds of disasters might involve the following data integrated into a modern data analytics platform:
- Search engine trend analysis: Understanding searches by geographic populations can provide an early warning signal of the problem’s magnitude.
- Social media-sentiment analysis: Social media details what is happening in real-time, and more importantly, gauges public reactions to emergencies.
- Surveillance camera integration and alerting: Surveillience exist in city centers, around critical infrastructure, and on most freeway systems. Integrating these cameras and instituting alerts that notify operations centers when an alert is triggered can act as a force multiplier to the limited staffing that most government agencies face when it comes to emergency management.
TIBCO Connected Intelligence for Government
Modern-day data integration and data analytics platforms, combined with the processing power of cloud computing, have made situational awareness platforms a budgetary reality for emergency preparedness organizations of all sizes. TIBCO Connected Intelligence solutions can enable a collaborative response from diverse government stakeholders from law enforcement to health and human services to humanitarian aid.
A situational awareness data platform can inform first responders the instant something happens, predict its potential growth, and help leadership monitor the event in real time.
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TIBCO Connected Intelligence allows government entities and businesses alike to:
- Connect seamlessly any application, device or data source.
- Unify data intelligently for better access, trust, and control.
- Predict confidently with real-time data-driven intelligence.
Ready to fuel more situational awareness with data? Check out TIBCO’s Resources for Government.
The post How a Situational Awareness Data Platform Can Inform Emergency Preparedness first appeared on The TIBCO Blog.
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