The government of the United States is broken - at the Federal, State, and local levels - 1 completely redundand federal govt, 50 states, territories, over 3,000 cities and thousands of overlapping city and town governments.
This made a lot of sense when you had large distances between populations, and slow transportation (pre 1930). It makes no sense today to allow for thousands of different approaches.
If you talk to people in these various entities you find out that redundancy, duplication and any lack of a standardized approach is mostly absent. Insurance is regulated by the states, and there are 51 separate methods of being an insurance agent? Why?
Corporations like WalMart and Home Depot have shown how standards drive success and efficiencies. If a WalMart exec suddenly decided he was going to something majorly differnt, he or she would quickly be shown the door.
Do we really need Fish and Game at both the federal level and all the states? As much as I love fishing, it makes no sense in our current financial straits. Are all the government agencies necessary? Why do the overap so much.
Imagine the blowback if someone suggested getting rid of states in favor of regions, or consolidating all the counties in one set of state provided services.
We have to change with the world if we're going to lead.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
OASIS - Structured Emergency Management Data
OASIS (www.oasis-open) is laying the groundwork for a sea change in how emergency management is handled. Elysa Jones heads up their technical committe and has been a tireless contributor for years (pro-bono).
Common Alerting Protocol, conceived in the late 90s/early 2000 is now becoming a world standard and saving countless lives with severe weather warnings (NOAA), Earthquake reporting (USGS), Tsunami Warning, and a host of other time senstive threats. CAP is easy to use, interoperabe so that you don't have to buy certain software, multi-lingual and other key constructs. There is nothing competitive to it that can handle the general nature of emergency alerts. FEMA has chosen CAP for their years after Katrina Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).
EDXL-DE (a stndardized delivery package that can address both explicit and functional addressees) and a host of other standards are either released or in development:
1. Resource Messaging: instead of random phone calls and the good old boy method of borrowing needed resources - EDXL RM brings a scalable, complete method for acquiring people, equipment, and other key resources using XML transactions.
2. HAVE: Don't you think hospitals should be able to report status (beds, doctors, and other vital information) automatically to the 9-1-1 centers so they are informed when it comes to a life or death decision of what hospital to route an accident patient to? Its all manual, but the Hospital Availability Standard makes this achieveable without massive cost.
3. Tracking of Emergency Patients
4. SITREPS: you would think that one standardized set of info that could e shared would make sense. It would. Everyone does it differently, including every federal agency, state, and local group. EDXL SITREP will change this.
And there is more......they won't throw in Ginzu knives, but this non-profit, tireless organization is working to fix the huge problems that exist today in the Emergency Management world. Kudos, kudos, kudos.
Common Alerting Protocol, conceived in the late 90s/early 2000 is now becoming a world standard and saving countless lives with severe weather warnings (NOAA), Earthquake reporting (USGS), Tsunami Warning, and a host of other time senstive threats. CAP is easy to use, interoperabe so that you don't have to buy certain software, multi-lingual and other key constructs. There is nothing competitive to it that can handle the general nature of emergency alerts. FEMA has chosen CAP for their years after Katrina Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).
EDXL-DE (a stndardized delivery package that can address both explicit and functional addressees) and a host of other standards are either released or in development:
1. Resource Messaging: instead of random phone calls and the good old boy method of borrowing needed resources - EDXL RM brings a scalable, complete method for acquiring people, equipment, and other key resources using XML transactions.
2. HAVE: Don't you think hospitals should be able to report status (beds, doctors, and other vital information) automatically to the 9-1-1 centers so they are informed when it comes to a life or death decision of what hospital to route an accident patient to? Its all manual, but the Hospital Availability Standard makes this achieveable without massive cost.
3. Tracking of Emergency Patients
4. SITREPS: you would think that one standardized set of info that could e shared would make sense. It would. Everyone does it differently, including every federal agency, state, and local group. EDXL SITREP will change this.
And there is more......they won't throw in Ginzu knives, but this non-profit, tireless organization is working to fix the huge problems that exist today in the Emergency Management world. Kudos, kudos, kudos.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
NGOs - saving the world, but could be much better organized...
If you have ever seen the cartoon of the king brushing off a machine gun salesman to go fight his war with a sword, that is an apt description of IT in many NGOs.
CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) and other standards are easily adopted and implemented, adn would save NGOs millions of dollars, reduce their dependance on the IT group (usually 10 years behind), allow sharing of resources, and save lives through much better situational awareness.
Why aren't they doing it? See para 1. There are a million excuses, but no good answers except for the lack of long term vision when you are crisis driven. I expect the ituation to change over the next year as cloud based tools become easier to use, more widely available, and utilized by budget and speed conscious leaders.
CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) and other standards are easily adopted and implemented, adn would save NGOs millions of dollars, reduce their dependance on the IT group (usually 10 years behind), allow sharing of resources, and save lives through much better situational awareness.
Why aren't they doing it? See para 1. There are a million excuses, but no good answers except for the lack of long term vision when you are crisis driven. I expect the ituation to change over the next year as cloud based tools become easier to use, more widely available, and utilized by budget and speed conscious leaders.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
