Overview: The United States Coast Guard blew the smoke and fire off of many of the original ICS forms developed for the fire service in order to make them more “all hazards” in nature. Organizations should also make the effort to customize the ICS form and positions to make them more user friendly for their personnel. The end result is NIMS compliance and a tool set that actually aids in incident management instead by building off of day to day processes and organizational structures.
A component of ensuring the ICS process is institutionalized within your organization requires the ICS tool to be useful and familiar to those tasked to utilize them. Too often agencies find themselves trying to change the way they do business during an emergency in order to fit into the generic ICS structures and tool set. The function of key Command and General Staff positions should remain consistent with ICS concepts to allow for interoperability with other response and support operations in major events. This does not mean that positions can’t be blended and formatted to better reflect day to day organizational structure to allow for more natural adoption of the ICS as a useful incident management system during an event. ICS forms can be customized to remain consistent with ICS documentation categories but be compatible with organizational activities and information collection and sharing processes.
Target Audience: Any agency or organization, civilian or military required to be NIMS compliant and desiring to institutionalize the ICS can benefit from this combination of remote and onsite service.
Duration: The exact time commitment will vary based upon organizational needs but ideally this service involves working withean internal development team to identify existing organizational structures and processes matched against traditional ICS functions and forms. Once the new ICS structures and forms are developed the draft documents which should be evaluated in a tabletop format to ensure suitability and collect input for revision. Typically this would involve an initial site visit workshop, remote draft document development, followed by an onsite tabletop to validate the tools.