Dallas County’s Office of Security and Emergency Management, in conjunction with the Dallas Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), has deployed incident management software to enhance emergency preparedness throughout the region.  This deployment allows counties and jurisdictions within the UASI to extend their crisis management capabilities and ensures information sharing among Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs) throughout North Central Texas. Reasonably new to security and public safety, software that assists in providing situational awareness, incident monitoring, crisis management is catching on. Some types of software also allow secured collaboration across diverse agencies. Dallas County is using E Team from NC4.

“During a disaster, it is imperative that we move from response to recovery as quickly and seamlessly as possible,” said Robie Robinson, director of security and emergency management, Dallas County.  “To expedite the response/recovery times, we decided to implement a common incident management software program that enables vital information sharing across the region – thus increasing the efficiency and accuracy of threat, incident, and recovery information.”

Funded via a Department of Homeland Security grant, Dallas County implemented six locally-hosted systems. The software provides users in North Central Texas with a common operational picture through standardized summaries, reports, requests, notifications, directives and annotated maps as well as a resource tracking utility.