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Boundless Collaboration Summer 2010 Edition |
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Boundless Collaboration™
News, tips and updates for the WebEOC® community
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Welcome to the Summer 2010 issue of Boundless Collaboration, an e-newsletter from ESi for the WebEOC community.
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Record Number of WebEOC® Users Attend Training Conference
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Under the theme of “the Power of Community – Going Global” more than 400 WebEOC® users assembled May 17-21, 2010 for the Sixth Annual WebEOC User Conference in Augusta, Georgia. WebEOC is the world’s leading crisis information management system.
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Welcome Address & Opening Panel: "Using WebEOC for Daily Operations"
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“The spectrum of WebEOC® users is amazing, from emergency managers who are still filing paper reports to those who are totally wired – and we have to serve all of our customers equally,” Nadia Butler told the assembly during her welcome address to the Sixth Annual WebEOC User Conference. “In the coming year, we’re going to look at ways to simplify our products and processes to make them easier to use,” she said. “WebEOC Administrators can help in this effort to make WebEOC more user-friendly by promoting its use on a daily basis.”.
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Ambassador Shares a Hopeful Plan for Haitian Reconstruction
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One month after the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck his country, Haitian Ambassador to the United States Raymond Alcide Joseph toured his homeland to view the devastation.
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The 2008 Mumbai Attacks and the Threat of International Terrorism
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“The currency of power in the twentieth century was deterrence, while the currency of power in the twenty-first century will be information,” Lt. General Summanwar, former Director General Military Intelligence told the assembled audience of emergency managers. “Your biggest weapon against terrorism is information as a tool – information as a management system.”
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The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
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“If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies. If you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but today starfish organizations are changing the face of business – and the world,” said Ori Brafman, author of The Starfish and the Spider.
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EOC Design/Briefing Forum: This Isn't Your Father's EOC!
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“We all know that many emergencies, disasters, and battles have been successfully managed from a tent with nothing more than radios,” Jim said. “But we’re in the business of protecting, lives, property, and careers, so arming ourselves with the best tools available is in everyone’s best interest.”
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ESi Developments in Spatial Visualization
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“GIS has historically been the domain of people with special training in special departments,” Adam said.” “Through ESi® and Tucuxi, we’re bringing GIS capabilities to everyone, especially emergency managers who don’t have special training and who only get occasional exposure to GIS during an exercise or incident.”
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Conference Culminates with User Award Banquet
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The Sixth Annual WebEOC® User Conference ended with a gala awards dinner on May 20. Many user awards were given out, including the Rookie of the Year, the WebEOC Board Designer of the Year, and the Boundless Collaborator Award, the WebEOC community’s highest accolade.
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ESi® Customer Support Team Gets Award from Grateful Customers
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During the Awards Banquet at the WebEOC® User Conference on May 20, 2010, a surprise award was presented to the ESi Customer Support Team from the Kentucky Department for Public Health.
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Our Values
As a company, ESi was formed to provide the tools necessary to help save human life and property during crisis situations. All of our actions are measured by our success in achieving this goal.
We value, above all, our ability to serve those people in the public and private sectors who put aside thoughts of personal safety and rush towards danger to selflessly help others.
We realize that in a crisis, shared information can mean the difference between life and death. We pledge to create products that will meet the mission-critical needs of first responders and emergency managers and to provide the training and support they need to use our solutions confidently and effectively.
WebEOC® and ESi® are registered trademarks of ESi Acquisition, Inc. Boundless Collaboration™ is a trademark of ESi Acquisition, Inc. All other referenced trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Boundless Collaboration Fall 2009 |
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Boundless Collaboration™
News, tips and updates for the WebEOC® community
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Welcome to the Fall 2009 issue of Boundless Collaboration, an e-newsletter from ESi for the WebEOC community.
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WebEOC in Action: Tanker explosion in Indianapolis
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On the morning of October 22, 2009, rush hour traffic moved normally at the junction of Interstates 465 and 69 in Indianapolis, Indiana ... until a liquid propane gas truck flipped on a highway ramp and exploded.
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Introducing WebEOC Mapper Professional 2.1 –
Display WebEOC data on a map with the push of a button
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With WebEOC Mapper Professional 2.1, you can create a dynamic, geographically-based common operating picture without the need for specialized GIS or mapping experience. Read more » |
WebEOC Best Practices
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Josh Newsome, Vice President, ESi Product Management, advises you on how to build high performance WebEOC status boards ... and gives you "the do's and don'ts."
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My Favorite Board
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Here is a Process Flow Switching Board from Brad Pond, ESi Vice President of Customer and Corporate Performance. It will be easy to install and use as is – or you can use it as an example for implementing process flow switches on your own.
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Ask Sam in Customer Service
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Sam Van Deest, ESi Customer Support Specialist, answers your WebEOC questions.
Q: I'm relatively new to WebEOC. I'd like to change the Position Log on our system, but I don't want to disrupt anything. Can you help?
A: That's a common concern of new users, but one that's easy to deal with. Read more » |
Living Better in an EOC
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Life in an EOC can be stressful. Here are tips on how to reduce stress, live healthier, be happier. Read more »
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Our Values
As a company, ESi was formed to provide the tools necessary to help save human life and property during crisis situations. All of our actions are measured by our success in achieving this goal.
We value, above all, our ability to serve those people in the public and private sectors who put aside thoughts of personal safety and rush towards danger to selflessly help others.
We realize that in a crisis, shared information can mean the difference between life and death. We pledge to create products that will meet the mission-critical needs of first responders and emergency managers and to provide the training and support they need to use our solutions confidently and effectively.
WebEOC® and ESi® are registered trademarks of ESi Acquisition, Inc. Boundless Collaboration™ is a trademark of ESi Acquisition, Inc. All other referenced trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Download the Boards
ESi® Supports the WebEOC® Community
In response to the intensifying outbreak of swine flu, ESi is undertaking several initiatives to assist the WebEOC community.
To address immediate needs, several pandemic boards and processes are available to assist you in tracking and responding to the swine flu outbreak. These boards are available for download from the Docs & Downloads section â?? Pandemic Boards. Remember that you must login with your username to access this folder. If you need assistance, we ask that you either contact your ESi regional manager or email
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In addition, ESi is hosting an ESiWebFUSION� network to support emergency operations worldwide. Several status boards have been established to provide participants with situational awareness and information sharing.
Initial participation in this network is limited to those organizations that are most affected by the outbreak. If you have questions about this effort, please email
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As the situation progresses, we will continue to evaluate our approach to supporting you. We invite you to visit WebEOC.com periodically for updates. Also feel free to send any boards you would like to share with the WebEOC user community to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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By BRAD POND, Vice President of ESi Customer & Corporate Performance
 I first started using this phrase after watching the 1990 Cold War thriller, The Hunt for Red October based on Tom Clancy's bestseller. CIA analyst Alec Baldwin is aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, desperate to cross a vast stretch of ocean to meet up with a Los Angeles attack sub, like the one I was stationed aboard. Admiral Fred Thompson says there's only one way: by racing a helicopter stripped of all unnecessary weight out to the sub. "A chopper turned into a flying gas can," he warns grimly. I believe it to be a good metaphor for the design and functional differences that are needed between war and peace time.
And you're thinking, oh great. Now Brad is going to talk about how building boards in WebEOC is comparable to battle. No, not quite. But if you consider usability up front, then the battle is yours! I've had a number of battles with building boards in WebEOC for the past 9 years. But I digress.
So here's the scene. It's peace time, you've got a few months before hurricane season gets here, and you need a new mission/task board to track all the activity that could arise during a hurricane event. So you start working on your board -- adding this and that, asking around to find out what logistics needs, and then a few more fields for operations. And don't forget the dollar values for finance. So you finish your board, you've got a snazzy list-type display view that supports all the stakeholders, but you have all the records showing. Not just the standard 25, but you've read on support.esi911.com about rowcount="0", and how that allows your group to see all records that are being worked at one time. And just in time, you finish before Hurricane Grace starts in your direction.
War time. On the day after landfall everyone is busy into recovery mode. You know this part: busy is an understatement. Suddenly there is too much data to process, your mission tasks are now at 1200 items -- some are duplicated -- and you can't find Bob's generator request. As soon as you scroll down and think you've found it, the board does a refresh! Augh. Need more coffee.
Response and recovery can be tough, but it doesn't have to be slow or complicated by bad design.
When we have all that "peace time" to design the board, we must remember to design for "war". Usability is about utility and the quality of being able to provide a good service. You want your boards to provide a good service to your users so that they can do their job efficiently and professionally. We all want as much information as possible to work from, and that's a given. But the presentation layer for data is critical to usability. Sometimes we get stuck in the trap of making all that data observable in one record row with the other 200-2000 items in the board.
What must be considered in making a board that considers usability as a core to design and function? This is the flying gas can approach. Just because you can load down the chopper with all the bells and whistles, doesn't mean you should. It could be that you need a flying gas can to accomplish your mission. Strip it down to the functionality needed to get the job done. Want to get down in the weeds? Then place all to the extra data behind a viewlink to a separate view. Once upon a time, we made this adjustment on the fly by stripping it down based on the input of the two people that were combing through the 1500 records. They were using the search function, but the rowcount="0" code was in the board, slowing down the overall performance while it pulled all 1500 records to the screen first, and then executing the search through the text. Needless to say, this was a performance (Read Josh Newsome's article) and design issue.
Sample expression code:
<expression name="shortened1">cast(description as nvarchar(100))</expression>... <viewlink name="Detail">[Read More]</viewlink>
In this sample "description" is the field being truncated down to the first 100 characters. Both of these are adjustable for your field and display purposes. The text [Read More] acts as a hyperlink and sends your user to the display view "Detail" as indicated in the Viewlink tag. Adjust "Detail" to be the name of your input or display view.
The final board had a record id, date last updated, status, and a short description field that were truncated using the sample expression code. We used this code to bring back the first 100 characters of the description field and jazzed it up with a Read More viewlink inside the description. The Read More viewlink took you to the details view with all of the data for that record (aka, down in the weeds). We also added a filter to remove the items that were completed from that active view. We made a separate display view to see those completed items, and placed it in the upper navigation area above the header.
The logistics end users were getting calls, e-mails, and requests with a record id to reference, and then a general term like generator. So the record id was the major search item, then description. We considered the font size of the status and record id in the board as a potential design improvement. With the fonts bigger than the other text in the row, it was easier for the end user to pick out items when scanning the data.
When it was all said and done, the board (aka flying gas can) had been stripped down to accomplish its specific mission. In doing so, we designed around the end user. In the solitude of peace time, it was a good idea to display all of that data at one time. But as the practical experience emerged, it was too much data to sort through and act on -- it wasn't meeting the utilitarian need.
Do your boards meet a utilitarian need?
Go build,
Brad
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