Responding to an incident is always the first step when confronting an adverse situation. Communication streams need to be in-place and functioning in order to mitigate the situation properly and in an appropriate time-frame. However, should we only concern ourselves with major catastrophes, or crises? Does it even make sense to spend time, money, and resources determining proper communication streams for less severe incidents?
Firstly, incident response shouldn’t be confused with governmental reporting requirements, like OSHA Injury and Illness Record-keeping and Reporting Requirements. Incident response is how an organization approaches and manages a negative occurrence to ultimately limit damage, externally and internally. Thus, OSHA requirements would be a subset, or line item, within an organizations incident response plan.
Establishing an incident response matrix, especially within manufacturing based companies, to manage varying incident types should be fairly apparent, based on the reporting requirements set forth by governmental agencies (e.g. OSHA). For instance, an “Environmental Event” that involves the releasing of pollutants or other regulated materials into the environment not only requires OSHA reporting, but notifications to local agencies, neighbors, and internal EH&S Manager(s). Incident response can therefore be highly customizable and unique depending on your business / organization type.
Considering the complexities of incident response, its success ultimately rests on fast and effective communication / notification to all relevant parties. Here, the devil is truly in the details. For instance, what if your incident response plan stated the following, ‘contact all crisis team members.’
· The first problem is that it does not state who the crisis team members are. This would affect response time. The responder would have to spend his or her time finding out whom to contact.
· Secondly, it does not define the acceptable communication mediums / methods (e.g. phone, text, email, and/or voicemail. One may assume a phone call is sufficient. However, what if the phone call is not answered? Without spelling out the acceptable communication methods and response requirements faulty assumptions may occur such as, believing the unanswered phone call had still met the requirement.
At CrisisDriver, we do not replace your incident response plan. Rather, we provide you the tools to conduct incident response in the most effective manner. For instance, with CrisisDriver you may customize your alert severity types to run parallel to your incident response categories / criteria. Furthermore, based on the settings you choose the notification gets distributed instantly to a pre-defined contact group set using three communication methods: SMS text, voicemail, and email. With CrisisDriver your incident responder never needs to remember contacts (as they’re built into the system), nor worry about communicating the right way…as it’s all done for him!
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