Using technology to increase organizational effectiveness.

Resilient Communities, Efficient Governments, a recent report from Hyland and GovLoop, presents techniques for preparing organizations for significant, disruptive events using tools that are designed to improve service delivery and cost-effectiveness every other day of the year. In this way, planning and preparation becomes less about disaster recovery and more about delivering better services to the community, no matter the conditions. The discussion then becomes about agility, speed of delivery and collaboration. The report includes four fundamental tools for building community resiliency, ways to integrate these tools into a platform for maximized responsiveness, and a case study from Arlington County, Virginia.

The report aims to be a starting point for organization that have budget and other restrictions but want to change the way they do business. It focuses on the concept of resilience and a community's ability to recover from economic hardship, natural disaster or extreme weather conditions, and adverse events such as a power outage or major criminal act. Departments are advised to begin their resiliency planning by examining their ability to preserve and readily access whatever information will be needed for decision making--information that is available under normal operations, but might not be sufficiently organized or accessible otherwise. Information that is kept in "silos," for instance, can be difficult to gather in an emergency situation.

The paper also suggests areas organizations can focus on to make their access to information more resilient. One area is redundancy; if everything is stored in one place, and access to that repository is cut off, the jurisdiction's response will be compromised. One of the first areas to tackle, then is making sure the community has several ways to access institutional knowledge and data. The second focus area is the ability to...