3 Strategies to Encourage Homeland Security Collaboration

3 Strategies to Encourage Homeland Security Collaboration
Address to the E-Gov.Com 2003 conference, June 12, 2003
by W. David Stephenson
Principal, Stephenson Strategies

The homeland security crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time: the Federal government faces a record deficit, state and local governments were already making drastic cuts, and corporations are mired in a double-dip recession, trying to cut costs where ever possible. Now each must assume major new costs for homeland security, with little apparent benefit to show for it.

Is there any glimmer of hope? Any way to realize ancillary benefits while improving homeland security?

I believe there is, and that collaboration is the key.

I will discuss three priorities vital to encouraging collaboration and minimizing costs:

First, I believe that effective, economical homeland security must go beyond simply encouraging sharing of resources, to requiring that they be shared.

Why?

Many of the problems we face today stem from the fact that, with the choice left to them, municipalities, states, and federal agencies chose incompatible systems and technologies. Most important, terrorist attacks — especially biological or chemical ones, do not respect geographic boundaries, and most metropolitan areas combine a large central city with radiating rings of smaller ones some even in adjacent states, so collaborative approaches make geographic sense. As Neil Peirce wrote about a speech Sec. Ridge made to the National Association of Regional Councils, “what’s at stake isn’t just ‘good government.’It could be survival, saving hundreds or even thousands of lives, in a serious attack. Mutual-aid agreements among local governments are critical, and the worst thing that could happen … would be thousands of ‘localities running around getting their own thing.’”

The recent round of DHS grants to major cities and their contiguous suburbs, and the HHS approach, requiring specific timelines for regional plans to combat bio-terrorism plans, should be the model for all federal homeland security disbursements.

The benefits are striking.

Take, for example, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which includes the District and 17 communities surrounding it. MWCOG was reportedly the first region in the US to create a regional disaster planning and management plan: the Regional Emergency Coordination Plan, or RECP. The plan includes a framework for collaboration in planning, communication, information sharing, and coordination of activities before, during, or after a regional emergency, whether a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

The key to making the RECP program work is effective communication among all the public and private groups throughout the region. Rather than leave purchasing technologies to implement that system to individual communities, the MWCOG created a specification for their Regional Incident Communication and Coordination System (RICCS) listing all the features needed for real-time communication among all the players. The RICCS lets local jurisdictions and state and federal agencies share information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. MWCOG chose E Team, a Web-based collaborative software, as its common solution. Illustrating a point I’ll touch on again later, the system has already paid off, under intense national scrutiny, when it was used to share information among the municipalities, states and federal agencies coordinating the efforts to catch the snipers.

We must also work collaboratively to overcome obstacles to sharing.

I’m very encouraged by the fact that more than 50 government and private groups united to create the Emergency Management XML Consortium, which is creating the first emergency management XML standard. This standard will extend XML’s ability to easily exchange data through a standardized set of tags to the specific needs of first responders and event management. According to Federal Computer Week, emXML will cover unified incident identification, emergency geographic information system data accessibility and usage, notification methods and messaging, situational reporting, source tasking, asset and resource management, financial tracking and public health reporting. Having a single standard to tag data about emergency management will not only help with immediate response, but will also help build usable data bases on past incidents that will help in analysis and planning.

Finally, there’s another important, non-technical reason for collaborative approaches that deserve mention. When you bring together larger numbers of communities, interests groups, and individuals, invariably the cross-fertilization of ideas
results in creative, innovative solutions that wouldn’t have occurred if each, no matter how smart, had worked in isolation. Those benefits from collaboration for crisis planning inevitably spill over to closer collaboration on daily challenges.

Second, to encourage true, sustained collaboration — especially involving the private sector, we must emphasize creative solutions that serve both security and economic goals.

I used to do a lot of work on creative corporate environmental strategies — ones that were simultaneously good for the planet and the bottom line. I believe the history of corporate environmental strategy may provide a useful roadmap for homeland security.

Earth Day was followed by an increasingly onerous set of governmental command-and-control mandates on industry. Not only were the changes themselves costly, but the paperwork to demonstrate compliance was also a problem. Then, a few enlightened companies discovered that they could cut the cost of compliance, and, in some cases, actually avoid having to file regulatory reports at all. The key was to radically changed their manufacturing methods and materials so that they simply didn’t create the problem wastes in the first place.

Leading firms such as Dupont, Interface and IBM are gaining a competitive advantage through zero-waste strategies that have not only cut their environmental impacts, but also made them more efficient, and even create new revenue streams. I believe the same paradigm shift is possible for homeland security, and that enlightened companies will eventually come to see it as an opportunity to cut their operating costs and increase efficiency.

That’s because good homeland security and profitable business have three things in common: eliminating error, streamlining processes, and improving your knowledge of those with whom you deal. For example, last month ago I spoke at the IEEE Homeland Security conference on a plan to use a variety of wireless technologies to simultaneously improve airport security — in large part by cutting down on chaotic masses of passengers moving aimlessly through poorly-marked terminals — and improve the flying experience. Devices such as replacement lighting ballasts that transmit information to wireless devices, or interactive billboards, could simultaneously streamline passenger flow through the airport and allow targeted marketing to those passengers who opt in to increase their patronage of in-terminal retailers.

Perhaps the best example of emerging technology that would simultaneously benefit businesses and security would be widespread deployment of e-seals for cargo containers. E-seals are RFID devices that would be applied by a US customs agent after inspecting a container at a foreign port. From then until the container was finally opened, authorities would be notified automatically if anyone had tampered with it, or opened the container.

Not only would this increase security, but the shipper and recipient would be able to use the RFID tag to identify the container’s precise location and contents. That would be a boon to just-in-time logistics. Another promising alternative is an inter-modal chassis tracking device, which would precisely locate the chassis transporting a container.

Nor does the collaboration with the private sector have to depend on technology. Butterfly Typhoon, a knowledge- management consulting firm, is working with all of the companies in a Los Angeles office park where it took more than 3 hours to evacuate all the employees on 9/11 because of the traffic chaos. The coordinated disaster-response plan they are creating together will not only reduce the chance of similar chaos were another attack to occur, but also reduce daily traffic congestion and may lead to other forms of collaboration as well as the firms begin to think as a community.

Finally, effective collaboration in homeland security will require that you and I — whether in our workplace rolls or simply as members of the general public — be given — or assume for ourselves — a greater role. I am continually surprised at how little substantive role the general public, or corporate rank-and-file is given in this issue. I can only conclude that dealing directly with the public is a secondary concern. What we’ve gotten is a combination of too little involvement — or too much. For example, I get immediate email alerts from several commercial sources whenever the alert level is changed — but I can’t sign up for a similar service on the Department of Homeland Security’s web site.

Or consider the debacle last winter when the Department of Homeland Security belatedly launched a public education program. It was so poorly organized that Secretary Ridge, instead of enthusiastically introducing the broad parameters of an effective personal preparation plan, made an offhand remark — and I quote “it’s probably not a bad idea to sit down and just arrange some kind of a contact plan.” How about, Mr. Secretary, telling people you should make a plan! Instead, duct tape and plastic — perhaps the least important and least effective measure one can take — became the only things most people remembered, probably because of the ridicule they got on Saturday Night Live and Jay Leno.

When I speak of too much of a role for the public, I think of initiatives such as the TIPS program. A lot of us believe this program — which would have made entire occupational groups, from milk men to truckers, into snitches — or others such as TIA, are invasions of privacy that probably won’t catch many terrorists but probably will snare a lot of innocent people, and will destroy public trust not only in government, and in each other.

Instead of these programs, how about treating us as real partners in this effort and actually give us solid, actionable information?

After calling for such a system for nearly two years in speeches and articles, I took things into my own hands. I worked with a Seattle firm, Town Compass, to create the “Terrorism Survival Plan,” a comprehensive, easily-searched guide to the best information from around the world on how to prepare for and/or respond to, a terrorist attack — compressed specifically so it can be stored and accessed easily on a PDA or Smartphone. After all, as we saw on 9/11, you and I are going to use PDAs and cell phones in a crisis. The only question is whether we’ll do so calmly, because we already have the information we need to respond, or whether we’ll needlessly clog the airways in a desperate attempt to keep in touch with others.

As I wrote in a TechCentralStation article that’s since been quoted by the Wall St. Journal and a number of other sources around the world, the power and widespread use of this personal technology convinced me that it’s time to turn part of the responsibility for homeland security over to “smart mobs.” That’s the term Howard Rheingold gave, in his book by the same name, to “groups of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways that were never possible before because they carry devices that possess both communicating and computing capabilities.”

Leveraging the power of technology-enabled “smart mobs” is necessary both for technological and manpower reasons.

Technologically, personal communications devices can, in addition to lessening the load on commercial networks in a crisis, actually expand networks’ power and range. Commercializing a solution it developed for the military to create ad hoc broadband networks on the battlefield, Mesh Networks’ Wi-Fi cards are a variation on peer-to-peer networks. Instead of clogging a conventional network, an ad hoc mesh network can operate in parallel, and, because it is wireless and requires little power, may still be available even if the landlines go down.

Equally important is the human aspect of “smart mobs” in a disaster. Rheingold talks in Smart Mobs about Reed’s law, named for researcher David Reed. Reed argues that a network that allows people to form groups trumps the power of a conventional network, which is already impressive, equaling the square of the number of nodes in the network (Metcalfe’s Law). By contrast, a “group-forming network” grows exponentially as the number of users increases - because they can form groups.

In an emergency, empowered users linked in such an ad hoc network would be able to act calmly and purposefully, allowing first responders and others to concentrate their efforts on helping those who are most directly affected - and those who weren’t part of such a network.

Despite some complaints, I’m optimistic about the future of collaboration in homeland security. We’ve already seen tremendous progress since 9/11 in areas such as information sharing between the FBI and CIA that have routinely excluded each other in the past.

Now it’s time to build on that initial record, with more creative strategies. If we:

–I think that one day historians will look back and re-appraise this terrible challenge as one that, due to its enormity and potential horror, forced us to abandon business as usual and develop collaborative strategies that not only reduce the risk of terror, but also improve our daily lives.

Thank you

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