“You don’t want to be trading business cards on the day of the disaster,” William Chapman, statewide interoperability and watch center manager at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management, said. “Those relationships and the building of trust is so important. You can’t do that over a Teams or a Zoom call.”
Chapman was part of a recent panel discussion at the annual Link Oregon member meeting. The conversation was focused on resiliency and maintaining operations during a disaster — whether human-made in the form of a cyber attack, or natural in the form of an extreme weather event. Regardless of origin, resiliency, recovery and mitigation need to be essential planning components — which should be steeped into the DNA of the organization, officials said.
“If you’re not prepared, resilience fails,” said Chapman. “If you don’t have a good response plan, or the resources to do the response, resilience fails. If you’re not prepared to do recovery, and you haven’t thought about it, and put the resources, time and effort into recovery, resilience fails. If you haven’t done the mitigation work, resilience fails. So, you have to do the work and think about each of those phases in order to be successful in resilience and bounce back better.”
That thinking needs to permeate the organization, said André Le Duc, vice president and inaugural chief resilience officer in the Division of Safety and Risk Services at the University of Oregon.
“The key is, you not only need to get the C-suite to understand that. You need to have everybody within the organization, everybody within the community … the only way that you make resilience work is, it has to be something that is practiced every day,” Le Duc, said during the panel. “You’ve got to bake the stuff in. It cannot be bolted on.”
Recovery from a disaster event should not be overlooked. It’s the stage of the process where organizations or communities can become better prepared for the future, and make needed updates and modernizations, Le Duc said.
“Recovery is something that often becomes kind of this afterthought. And quite frankly, it is the magic of resilience,” he said. “If something happens, you have to have plans in place that you do not, in the recovery phase, just build back to what you were.”
Similarly, recovery needs to be thought of before the disaster happens, Chapman said.
“But tie it to mitigation. Tie it to response,” he added, noting protection and prevention “are really important when we talk about technology.”
