Homeland Security

Assessing Preparedness Capabilities

Collaborative, multidisciplinary capability assessments are essential tools that offer a snapshot of your current state of preparedness. Although the snapshot represents one point in time, integrating the results into your cycle of preparedness activities provides long-term benefits. Your jurisdiction can use quantitative and qualitative results to evaluate a portfolio of prevention, protection, response, and recovery capabilities that matter to you. The analysis informs your understanding of your current capabilities, allowing you to establish target levels of capability and to begin to close identified capability gaps. Effective assessments will support strategic and operational planning; training and exercise initiatives; overall priority setting; and funding decisions.

► Capability Assessments Guide (View pdf)

Defining Capabilities Meaningfully

Defining capability requirements and making investment decisions require an approach that is risk-based, measurable, and repeatable, as well as one that answers four critical preparedness questions in support of implementing an overarching homeland security strategy:

• What capability is needed?
• How much capability is needed?
• Where is capability needed?
• How do we validate that capability exists?

A rigorous process for answering these questions will enable continuous evaluation of current and risk-based target capability levels and will ensure that governments and agencies make the right investments—particularly in an environment of limited resources—to manage risk effectively. The approach centers on repeatedly identifying capability gaps, optimizing application of resources to close the gaps, and validating capabilities to guarantee performance in actual events. Accomplishing these objectives requires the development of a capability framework that balances risk mitigation, capability gain, and cost; and a standardized way to validate capabilities and measure progress.

► Defining Capabilities Meaningfully: Setting Targets, Locating Resources, Validating Capabilities (View pdf)

Measuring National Preparedness

Despite experimenting with more than a half-dozen measurement approaches over the past ten years, the nation still lacks a coherent, structured system for answering the following questions: How prepared are we? How prepared do we need to be? How do we close the gaps?

To successfully drive the activity of an organization toward attainable objectives, executives in both business and government need to understand what to measure and how to measure. Measuring the wrong elements will waste precious time and resources, closing gaps that are not actually important. Likewise, measuring the right elements poorly will produce an inaccurate understanding of where the organization stands relative to its goal. Constructing and implementing a national preparedness measurement framework based upon key principles will afford a new vantage point from which to understand and evaluate preparedness as individual communities, jurisdictions, and states, and as a nation.

► “What Gets Measured Gets Done”: A Framework for Measuring National Preparedness (View pdf)

A New Approach to Regional Catastrophic Planning

Disasters do not recognize jurisdictional boundaries, and, as events expand to involve or overwhelm multiple jurisdictions, individual plans come into conflict. The problem lies not with technical planning proficiency, but rather with how that proficiency is brought to bear to address specific operational requirements that transcend jurisdictional boundaries.

Overcoming challenges to regional catastrophic planning will not be achieved by simply applying typical emergency planning approaches within a larger regional footprint. We propose to plan selectively, focusing on specific, prioritized operational needs that transcend jurisdictional boundaries throughout the region.

► Regional Catastrophic Planning: A New Approach (View pdf)