24/7 Software Blog

Last night’s event had you scrambling.

Your team responded to one incident call after another.

No one had any downtime.

About 100,000 people attended this year’s motocross show. Dirt, ramps, and professionals flying in the air on dirt bikes.

Who wouldn’t want to participate, right?

For your customers, it was a night they will never forget.

You’re just glad it’s over.

Now, it’s 5 AM Monday morning.

You always get to your office early these days to prepare for the Monday morning calls.

You start scouring through your office.

You’re looking for the stack of incident files from last night’s event.

The executives always want a snapshot of the previous week’s events.

It’s not too bad, but it’s been a real struggle to get all the information, so you’ve been dropping the ball lately.

You cannot afford to lose it again.

They need the number of incidents, customer requests, injuries, medical evacuations, fights, and ejections.

They’re known to throw some tough questions at you from time to time.

You’re running on empty because of last night, and this might be the final straw for you if you don’t find the files you need.

You already “misplaced” incident reports in the past.

You’re out of excuses.

“Where are last night’s documents,” you scream down the hall.

Everyone looks at you, and your operations coordinator, Tyler, responds, “Everything is in your office.”

But, you only see the remnants of a couple of files from customer services’ reports.

It appears that Housekeeping saw the files stacked near your trash pile.

Everything is gone.

You panic because you know you’re going to be taken out like the trash too.

It is 9 AM.

Time for your call.

You have nothing, and your job is on the line.

How does this make you feel? Could this have been prevented?

Yes.

“Alberto is pushing deeper inland after making landfall in the Florida Panhandle on Memorial Day, causing flash flooding, mudslides, downed trees and power outages through parts of the South, East and central U.S. and prompting officials to warn of an imminent dam failure in North Carolina,” writes John Stempin and Scott Neuman in their recent NPR article entitled “Remnants Of Alberto Cause Dangerous Flooding In Parts Of Central And Eastern U.S.”

“Flooding and mudslides shut down highways in the mountains of North Carolina, west of Charlotte,” Stempin and Neuman explain.

According to the article, “Shortly after midnight, the National Weather Service and local authorities in McDowell County, North Carolina, issued evacuation warnings for people living downstream of Lake Tahoma, where they said a dam failure is ‘imminent."

“It included people living in Old Fort, a largely rural area about an hour from Asheville. It was not clear how many people were affected by the evacuation order,” the NPR piece continues.

"We've had a lot of rain, but we got lucky. It was a constant rain but not a heavy rain," Regina Myers, emergency management director in Walker County northwest of Birmingham, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying, shares Stempin and Neuman later in the NPR article.

While the dangerous flooding was not representative of a Hurricane, it prompted our concern and warranted an article.

Hurricane season starts June 1^st in the United States, and Summer officially begins the end of June, which means heavy wind and rain is likely.

It also means you must be proactive.

You must be weather-ready.

We’re here to help!

Are you ready?

“Among the lawmakers' concerns: How Facebook might make up possible abuses to its users — and whether Zuckerberg himself is telling the truth when he promises to obey Europe's privacy laws,” writes Bill Chappell in their recent NPR article entitled “Are You Telling The Truth?' European Parliament Questions Mark Zuckerberg.”

According to Chappell, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took questions from members of the European Union Parliament on Tuesday about allegations that personal data of European Facebook users was misused. The testy session ended with several members of Parliament complaining that Zuckerberg had failed to address their most pressing questions.”

“Zuckerberg conceded that Facebook had not been ready to fight off fake news that spread quickly on its site. And he apologized for the improper use of millions of users' data to help political campaigns, after an analytics company gained information that had been collected by a quiz app,” the article explains.

"Whether it's fake news, foreign interference in elections or developers misusing people's information, we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibilities," Zuckerberg said in Chappell’s NPR piece. "That was a mistake, and I'm sorry," he continues in the article.

Whether you believe Zuckerberg is telling the truth or not, we’ve pinpointed an essential lesson for you.

Keep reading; we’ll explain.

We’ve talked about the impact of ‘truth’ throughout your operation for years now.

But, sometimes the concept and its importance are overlooked.

It’s not because you want to overlook it either.

You’re just charged with managing a ton of responsibilities, so truth in your data can become a missed issue.

We get it; you’re confronted with high-priority situations at a fast pace.

But, that’s also why this lesson is essential – it’ll help you get the truth.

It’s time to pause, refocus, and get the right information starting today.

How do you think an incident management system helps you become proactive?

Chances are, if you’re not using one, you’re running a reactive operation.

You know that’s bad for business, but so is pen and paper.

You’re probably still using that too.

In today’s article, we want to move you away from pen and paper as it causes you to be reactive.

We’d like to help you transition to an incident management system.

Not just for all the bells and whistles, but specifically for your ability to be proactive.

We know all of the benefits of using incident management software solutions.

But, today we’re going to zero in on the aspects of an incident management system that allow you to move from a reactive operation to a proactive one.

So, what about these software solutions will help you become proactive?

Let’s not waste any time.

“Today was the day astronomers said goodbye to the old Milky Way they had known and loved, and said hello to a new view of our home galaxy,” writes Nell Greenfieldboyce in their recent NPR article entitled “You Are Here: Scientists Unveil Precise Map Of More Than A Billion Stars.”

“That's because a European Space Agency mission called Gaia just released a long-awaited treasure trove of data: precise measurements of 1.7 billion stars,” explains Greenfieldboyce.

According to the article, “It's unprecedented for scientists to know the exact brightness, distances, motions and colors of more than a billion stars. It will yield the best three-dimensional map of our galaxy ever.”

Having such a “treasure trove” of data to pinpoint the location of stars – that’s what we call situational awareness!

"This is a very big deal. I've been working on trying to understand the Milky Way and the formation of the Milky Way for a large fraction of my scientific career, and the amount of information this is revealing in some sense is thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times larger than any amount of information we've had previously," said David Hogg, an astrophysicist at New York University and the Flatiron Institute, in Greenfieldboyce’s NPR piece.

"We're really talking about an immense change to our knowledge about the Milky Way," Hogg continues in the article.

“The Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013 and is orbiting our sun, about a million miles away from Earth. Although it's surveyed a huge number of stars, Gaia is charting only about 1 percent of what's out there. The Milky Way contains around 100 billion stars,” Greenfieldboyce shares.

That’s a few more stars than incidents you have on your property.

But, it brings up an important topic we’d like to discuss today.

One that we believe you’ll get immediate value from by leveraging the solution we share in this article.

‘Situational awareness’ is a critical part of your job.

Agree?

But, it can often slip through the cracks because of all the other responsibilities your team is charged with managing.

New ideas, process, or technology for improving your awareness of incidents on your property might get overlooked.

Not today.

Keep reading; we’re going to share a solution proactive operations are using to get the “revealing” information needed to manage your property’s incidents in real time.

Safety of your customers is critical.

They become your responsibility every time they walk onto your property.

Agree?

That’s why it’s important to understand how effective incident management helps your initiatives.

Defined, well-organized processes lead to proactive execution.

We can’t put a price on the importance of this.

Can you?

Understanding how vital your management is to your team’s performance will help you deliver an exceptional experience for customers every day.

But, it’s not an easy undertaking.

It takes time, effort, and possibly making mistakes along the way to get to a place where you’re confident in what your operation can accomplish.

But, you need to do it – your customers rely on your ability to keep them safe.

We understand the importance of this.

That’s why we want to help.

We’re going to discuss the ten things you need to know about incident management.

But, the concepts below are also integrated into how you should augment your operations using a software solution.

It’s different than most articles on a topic like this – but we think it’ll be powerful and extremely valuable to you and your team.

How does that sound?

Let’s not waste any more time!