How Training Technology Can Play a Role in National Disasters

Readiness is crucial for public safety organizations.

With the right equipment, education, and organizational readiness, as we discussed in our piece on wildfires, reacting to any sort of large-scale emergency becomes immensely easier.

As COVID-19 and the “new normal” continue to demonstrate, these touchpoints apply just as well to any public safety organization—including both federal and military entities.

Readiness: Infrastructure remains essential

When a foreign threat attacks or a natural disaster strikes, the military needs to be able to respond as quickly and competently as possible, with the best tools at the ready for leaders.

There is always room for more efficiency to increase readiness—and an entity as singularly large as a branch of the U.S. military has a lot to gain by tightening up its decision-making capacity, considering the massive savings of even small changes when leveraged across the massive subsections of the institution.

Consider the vital role that infrastructure plays in carrying both physical items (e.g., armaments and people) and information (orders, training data).

Focusing on information management, recent initiatives to ease the flow of information within and across military branches show, at minimum, that the highest levels of government are aware of the detrimental effect of data silos on both national security and the federal government’s ability to respond.

The benefits of training system efficiency

Initiatives that stop data silos frequently have an added benefit: a cohesive working environment.

While services like milConnect make certain tasks easier for the collective end users to complete, the military—and federal law enforcement—are large entities with endlessly diverse computer system needs.

Standardizing and leveraging data across systems—already a major focus in military IT design—becomes simpler when systems already offer cross-functionality outside of their primary domain.

To be sure, disseminating information is already a skill of the military and federal law enforcement—but how could a system designed to centralize training info alongside other key individual data help further it?

For military branches and subbranches

With centralized information, more efficient data management allows better decision-making in unexpected situations, a great counter to the inertia that large organizations sometimes experience when circumstances demand they move quickly.

As the largest group addressing national-level challenges, the ability to quickly assign roles based on a whole view of personnel’s training and employment history makes flexibility in response far easier and less uncertain.

For federal and state-level law enforcement

Efficient training data management improves interorganizational flexibility. In the context of a disaster, this might mean more easily pulling people or resources from other states that have a surplus.

Centralizing data makes it simpler to assign roles to new recruits the receiving agency is unfamiliar with by gaining a granular and searchable view of the “borrowed” unit’s employment history instead of a folder full of their highest-level qualifications.

In the context of a national disaster, such efficient training systems enable:

• Acclimating new “borrowed” units with prior standardized training to the specifics of their newfound, temporary workplace.
• Rapidly delivering standardized information and training to new recruits using digital media—especially important considering the massive spike in enrollment that national disasters can cause.
• Quickly creating and enabling new tasks and roles based upon demands from changing circumstances (e.g., distributing updated information on sanitation and PPE standards following the initial COVID-19 outbreak).

Tying it together with the right tools

By unifying the tools various departments or partnering agencies utilize, you can get a comprehensive view of all the data you need, shared within a single workspace.

Beyond the benefits already raised, robust training and information sharing creates combined efficiencies that really add up in large organizations: fewer person hours wasted learning new tools for temporary tasks, training staff on new systems, and so on.

As experts in public safety software, Envisage Technologies can speak to the importance of having tools designed to increase your readiness and evolve with your organizational needs.