ESS Crisis™ Enables Teams to Streamline Response at Major Terrorism Exercise

Several months before OPERATION TOPOFF 4, an incredibly complex terrorism preparedness exercise, the Tempe, Arizona Fire Department selected the on-demand version of ESS Crisis™ to manage its daily planning and emergency event mitigation at the city’s emergency operations center. Tempe Fire Department was an important customer win for us, not only because our own headquarters is located in Tempe, but because it gave us a chance to try out our SaaS product in a very important context.

TOPOFF 4, which took place October 15-24 at several venues in Arizona and Oregon, was designed to strengthen the nation’s capacity to prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The exercise provided an opportunity for local, state and federal agencies to coordinate emergency preparedness efforts among 10,000 participants, including officials from Arizona and Oregon; overseas support from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Guam; and with the full-scale tests of collective preparedness and interoperability.

During last month’s exercise, imaginary radiological incidents occurred in Tempe/Phoenix, Portland and Guam. Local officials were tasked with coordinating and executing proper responses to the incidents using effective communication and coordination among various levels of government agencies and private responders. Federal, state and municipal agencies had to work together in this test. Once the exercise was complete, the Department of Homeland Security evaluated the Tempe responder team’s performance and gave them a report card in an effort to improve the City’s preparedness and incident management.

A growing number of local first responders like those in Tempe and Gilbert, another Phoenix-area suburb, have automated their pre-event preparedness and onsite coordination. Exercises like TOPOFF 4 are a powerful reminder that interagency coordination and system interoperability will be key factors to ensure that future terrorism response efforts are to be successful. Departments both large and small will need automated tools like Crisis to ensure they will be ready when a major incident occurs. In a real crisis, it could turn out to be a lifesaver.

Add comment November 15th, 2007

Service-Oriented Architecture Goes Corporate Mainstream

Web 2.0 (user-generated content) has come to the enterprise in a big way. Far from merely looking the other way while employees spend time on Facebook, Web 2.0 for the enterprise means companies are creating internal social networks for employees, customers, and vendors and customers are taking a larger and larger role in product development.

The buzzword for all this is SOA (service-oriented architecture), which actually has little to do with software design, and everything to do with listening to the customer and involving customers in how applications are developed.

For now, the ideal application architecture is SOA. All corporate application developers want Web 2.0 and business process management (BPM), along with SOA in order to satisfy the short-term and long-term needs of their clients.

Thus, it’s critical to understand that SOA is a term of art that applies not only to software development, but to customer relations as well. It involves making the entire enterprise aware of the customer at every moment.

ESS has a long history of asking its customers to participate in the design of its products. In the early days of the company, we actually sent our customers faxes on a weekly basis, asking for their input! We then moved our efforts to the quickly-emerging Internet. So it isn’t surprising that we are now a leader in rolling out SOA and creating a platform that takes advantage of the insights and needs of our customers.

We are implementing SOA now and are on a five-year plan to continue rolling it out in the technology development of our software. SOA enables us to take information from our customers about emerging issues and problems in their businesses and produce the right solution. This is our strategy to maintain industry leadership and our commitment to enable our customers to solve their real world GRC and EHS problems.

1 comment October 25th, 2007

Key Elements of Change Management: Standardize, Centralize, Simplify

I just read an interview featuring Bob Otto, the retiring CIO and CTO of the U.S. Postal Service in CIO Insight, and it excited me because I just know he is right on the money. If you want people to accept new technology it must be standardized, centralized and simplified.

After a discussion of the pace of change in technology during Otto’s tenure, interviewer Brian Watson asks him how he gets his people to accept change:

“I have three guiding principles—principles I’ve used since I was young. First, standardize everything. If you find a process you like, standardize it. Second, centralize everything you can. If you have services in five different places and you can centralize them, you will have reliability, predictability. Third, simplify. The computer has taken over your life, so I want it to be intuitive [for people to operate and manage]. I also test my own dog food. Everything we build has to pass the “Bob” factor. I put myself in the place of the lowest common denominator, of someone who might not have a high school degree. I look at how people could be intimidated by technology, and I don’t want them to have a hard time.”

I like the part about testing his own dog food; I’ve always tried to do that as well. Those are the same guidelines we use when we develop our enterprise software. We are aiming for a centralized information repository that enables our customers to look at a global enterprise from one dashboard.

Meanwhile other organizations are learning to standardize, centralize simplify when managing change based on new technology. Last year, ESS went into a Fortune 500 company and replaced 67 separate applications that were being used to monitor environmental health and safety, crisis management, waste and emissions. Replacing all those disparate applications with our integrated GRC platform, thereby standardizing and centralizing the operation, saved the company $1.5 million in support costs, upgrade costs and other direct costs associated with deploying those applications.

In addition, the company was able to redeploy 200 people who had previously been engaged merely in supporting those applications.

It goes without saying that the company was thrilled, but as I was driving home from the office yesterday it occurred to me that we had also minimized their risk.

How? It’s simple. All those applications prevent a company from having a holistic view of its business risk. Every silo of data is viewed separately, without the strategic overall perspective the company really needs.

What’s more, every separate application actually increases the risk involved in data integrity. When all that data is imported into a tool that does give an overall view, how do C-level managers know whether the data has become corrupt on its journey through the applications to the dashboard?

So I’ve come to the conclusion that our unified platform is itself a risk manager — preventing the corruption of data by giving the enterprise a way to look at all its data through the same lens.

So standardize, centralize and simplify works.

Although I am technical, much of our software is deployed at the plant level by people who do not have time to struggle with new technology and would rather ignore change if it doesn’t simplify their lives. They are busy. Ease-of-use is a must. What good is an all-in-one dashboard if the relevant information can’t be accessed by the guy in the plant as well?

2 comments October 8th, 2007

Leading Analyst Firm Confirms ESS’ Industry Leadership

I’m so proud today. I just got back from Bogotá, Columbia to find out that AMR, one of the most respected analysts covering IT issues, published an Alert that says some pretty good things about us:

“… a few of the panelists at our conference shared more than a commitment to sustainable supply chains; they also shared a common software provider. And it’s not their ERP platform - all three use ESS to help them track the EH&S elements of their sustainability activities. AMR Research recently spoke with a series of ESS customers and their consensus is clear; leveraging ESS as a single environmental instance helps centralize EH&S structures that originally were comprised of a potpourri of homegrown and manual systems.”

I feel like a father whose child is graduating from college. Here’s some more from the report:

“A multinational chemicals manufacturer has ESS deployed at over 200 sites and supporting 600 users on a single instance. The instance interfaces to MES, LIMS and waste characterization tools for the standardization of work processes, procedures and training. This new single version of the truth builds on a platform of standardized calculations.

When we surveyed the available landscape of technology options for support of environmental health and safety (EH&S) efforts at the end of 2006, we discovered that despite the presence of a few mature players in the vendor ecosystem, the EH&S compliance market was crying out for a leader (see the AMR Research report, “Technology Options To Support EH&S Compliance”). ESS is emerging as a strong candidate for companies seeking to centralize their EH&S processes to a single platform outside of their ERP instance. And an attractive partner (or even acquisition target) for vendors seeking to expand their environmental footprint.”

I promise not to do this again, but allow me my moments of pride.

“While ESS and… [our competitors] have all been capitalizing on the current market demand for enterprise-class applications to support environmental compliance practices across multiple sites on a single instance, ESS has distanced itself from the pack …”

If you are our customer, I thank you. And if you work for us, I thank you even more.

Add comment August 17th, 2007