As Winter Storm Fern made its way across the US this weekend, children across the country were glued to phones, computers, or televisions as they tried to guess how long they would be out of school this week. Little do they know, however, the data, science, and lack thereof, that goes into that decision.
School closures are the very public end of a complex and fast-changing dataset that is highly dependent on locality and can be wildly different on either side of a district line. Nearly every municipal agency plays a role in the decision, either directly or indirectly. Emergency Management, Transportation, and Public Works all create, manage, and disseminate data that drives the decision between having a school day or a snow day.
Operational Data Lives Across Municipal Boundaries
Emergency Management is responsible for ensuring that, in someone’s absolute worst moment, help is available. This means understanding the environment, including the probabilistic outcomes of severe winter weather. Will the district get an inch of ice? Six inches of snow? A whole lot of rain? These outcomes have unique probabilities based on ground temperature and high- and low-pressure systems.
Transportation needs to know which outcome to plan for. If there is snow or ice pre-treating the roads can improve recovery times. However, if it rains first, the pre-treatment will wash away. Once the snow starts to fall, understanding the status of the fleet, which has broken blades or salt spreaders, what will the impact be to fuel budget, and how long will the snow continue, all define how they will respond to the event.
Public Works is on call to respond to downed power lines, fallen trees, and other hazards that can impede traffic. They are also looking for water mains and other infrastructure that is impacted by extreme temperatures and weather.
School Districts need to know the outcomes of this analysis to determine whether it is safe for school buses to pick up children.
Why No Agency Decides Alone
Each of these agencies is operating with data that is unique to them, but also contains information that is necessary for others to make decisions. No group needs all of the data from another. Instead, the school district needs to know things like road status, probability of re-freeze, and if there are road hazards that will impact the buses.
In the same vein, local emergency managers need to know the status of city or county infrastructure, school openings, and road status to ensure that they direct support and emergency services to the right places.
Historically, these collaborations would take place with phone calls and liaisons in a central crisis hub. Long hours and bad coffee were the trademark of the crisis hub. Now that much of this data can be digitized, coordination is less about phone calls and emails and has shifted to APIs and data segmentation. Ensuring that the necessary data is made available to those who have the appropriate need to know and need to access.
Transforming Data Into Operational Information
The knee jerk reaction from emergency managers is to ask for all the data and let them sort out what is necessary. This is understandable when data movement is slow or dependent on human actors. However, as IOT and telemetry become more pervasive humans are quickly overloaded with the sheer quantity of data. Most of which is irrelevant to the question at hand.
Another reaction is to open the systems and data to anyone who asks. This presents a critical cybersecurity risk while failing to meet the actual need, which is a demand for Information. The more appropriate method is to allow data access but within appropriate safeguards such as role or attribute-based access policies. This enforces data protection while ensuring that those who need it still have access.
Crisis Management has a saying: “Data is useless. Data plus Analysis equals Information and Information plus Experience equals Judgement.” In complex decision-making telemetry is outweighed by context and the analysis of a piece of data in the context of other entities’ data is what allows for a confident decision to be reached. Leveraging the community of experts and the analytical systems available to them enables communities to make the decisions which are in the best interest of community safety.
As children across the country take advantage of the weather it is worth remembering the difficult decisions and complex operations required to dig our communities out of the snow.
Enabling Data Sharing and Contextual Access for Informed Decision-Making
If you are responsible for decisions that depend on data from multiple organizations, it may be worth asking not how much data is available, but whether the right information is reaching the right people at the right time. At archTIS, we spend our time helping organizations design data sharing that supports confident, contextual access and decision-making across boundaries. Contact us to start a conversation.
