But what, says Rod Stafford, Director of Command Development for VectorCommand, if there was a different approach: a way to allow commanders and managers at all levels to contribute to and interrogate a common operational picture which allows everyone to focus on the job in hand, supported by live information presented in their own perspective?

The common operational picture is a doctrinal concept, and like all doctrine discussion around it is all too often couched in purely military terms.  A few clicks on the Internet will get you to the Wikipedia entry, which reads: “A Common Operational Picture (COP) is a single identical display of relevant (operational) information (eg position of own troops and enemy troops, position and status of important infrastructure such as bridges, roads, etc.) shared by more than one command. A COP facilitates collaborative planning and assists all echelons to achieve situational awareness.”
It is not necessary to delve much farther into the entry to realise that this is all about enemies and battles, concepts with no place in a civil context.  However this militaristic definition, with all its associated jargon, does give some hint to the underlying relevance the concept has to the areas of civil protection.

When you think about it, reporting is not actually the most effective way to achieve a shared understanding of the operational situation.  Obviously, in a multi-agency context where terminology may differ, reporting as a tool to build a common operational picture is certainly less effective, but internally, where terminology is not an issue, reporting may not be the best way to understand what is going on. When responding to an emergency, much of the communication between tiers of command consists of descriptions of the situation – reports that are subjective and time-consuming.
When the emergency requires the capabilities of more than one agency then once again the majority of the communication between agencies also consists of descriptions of the situation.  These reports are even more subjective than those delivered internally as they presume that those compiling them understand the information needs of those for whom they are intended: where they don’t, then vital information is omitted, and where they do understand that information irrelevant to them might have relevance to others, the report is overloaded with detail.

In the example of an incident where there are three responding agencies, each with three tiers of command, the middle tier has to communicate to four other command nodes (up, down and to two other agencies) – a level of reporting/communicating which rapidly escalates where greater numbers of agencies are involved.  Imagine the situation in a complex urban environment where there might be tens of agencies involved in the response; building an understanding of the operation simply through situation reporting becomes challenging – maintaining it is nigh on impossible.

Even when the physical distance between command nodes is limited, the problem remains; there are countless examples of disaster response where each agency establishes command posts near the scene, in close proximity to each other, and yet they fail to share an understanding of the operational situation. Or where purpose-built multi-agency command centres house not only a meeting place for a strategic coordinating group, but also cells for individual agencies to base liaison staff and maintain links back to their own command facilities. And yet a casual observer walking around the cells would see each with their own whiteboards, their own maps, their own situation boards, and all the time the staff are fighting a losing battle to keep their walls current with the information being passed around from their fellow responders.
These examples articulate the core problem: that we don’t want to know what someone thinks is going on, we want to know what is actually going on – and then we will interpret its meaning in the context of our own organisation and role.
This is where procedure and technology come in: technology which enables the building and sharing of a common operational picture, and procedures that ensure that the right people contributed the right information at the right time, and in turn were able to access the right information in the right context.

This approach is illustrated in the context of a single responder in Figure 1, where all tiers of command contribute to and interrogate a system which holds the common operational picture.  Clearly this does not negate the need for communication between tiers of command, but it does mean that this residual communication will be focused on the business of command, and not asking and answering questions about what is going on.

The next obvious question centres around what exactly a common operational picture should consist of.  In the civil protection context there is much information which adds substantially to the understanding of a situation – information about your own resources (not just where they are, but what they’re doing, for whom, and when they’re likely to be free for the next task); about the physical environment (building plans, contents of storage facilities etc); and about known risks (type of hazard, response plans).  Add to that live imagery from existing sources (CCTV, command vehicle cameras, etc and we have a complex framework for understanding what we mean by “what’s going on”.

The overall effect of this technology (supporting an appropriate doctrine and implemented using the right procedures) in the context of emergency management would be the ability to coordinate multiple teams from multiple agencies into a single capability.  Technology used in this way is in fact transformational; the junior commander using a small touch-device to sketch out the next stage of their plan to their team (captured into the system); an incident commander allocating resources into the response structure which have been made available by control (integrated with mobilising data), checking what the impact of the situation might be on nearby risks (pre-loaded onto the system), and logging his decision and reasoning (immediately visible to his subordinates and seniors) and then overseeing the conduct of his plan on a dynamically linked map, while watching his teams on heli-tele and simultaneously briefing his commander (conferencing).

Put simply, every commander at every level, and their support staff, able to contribute to the common operational picture while simultaneously being able to interrogate the system for information available only because of the cumulative contribution of others.

Yet we need to avoid a technically trivial website solution to this problem; if all data is stored in one bucket, losing your communications would leave you with nothing – and is there ever a post-incident report which does not cite poor communications as an issue?  What we need is a system which allows all users to have the incident data local to them, with changes that are made being trickled across the network of users in the background, as and when they occur.  In this way you would still be able to interrogate everything that you had access to, up to the moment you lose contact – and as soon as the system finds a communication path again you’ll get an instant refresh of anything you’ve missed.
So, a new approach; an approach that prevents our commanders having to spend all of their time reading and compiling reports, and yet doesn’t overload them with irrelevant information:  letting them get on with the job in hand and basing their decisions and actions on a common operational picture – live.

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