The 5th Annual Knowledge Center Training and User’s Conference was held October 26-27 in Pittsburgh. For those of you unfamiliar with Knowledge Center, it is internet based incident management software that Chester County Department of Emergency Services utilizes on a daily basis. This software enables DES to more efficiently manage incidents of all natures in a more organized manner. This software is used by many counties, municipalities, and various other agencies throughout the Commonwealth and other states.
The conference provided insight into some of the upcoming releases that Knowledge Center will be conducting. November releases will include a more advanced and user friendly ESRI viewer mapping system. In addition a damage assessment module will be added to simplify and better organize the damage assessment process. Open discussion forums were also held to provide feedback from different agencies on what they would like to see in future developments of the software.
Future developments of Knowledge Center, which is currently only available in Internet Explorer Browser, include the availability to access the software on all browsers. In addition the software will soon be available on the Ipad and other mobile devices. The software development team is actively working on developing a mobile suite of applications. Another future development in the works is integrating credentialing with the software.
Presentations were made by various individuals within the Emergency Management Community. The director of Westmoreland County, PA EMA provided a presentation on how Knowledge Center provided his organization regional situational awareness throughout all phases of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Westmoreland deployed a swift water rescue task force to the Eastern part of PA during both storms. A representative from Anoka County, Minnesota (EMA) provided insight on how the use of SKYWARN and Knowledge Center can better leverage situational awareness. Finally a representative from the Delaware Valley Healthcare Council provided a demo on how Knowledge Center provides a valuable connection between hospitals and emergency management agencies during events and disasters.
Overall the event was a great success. It provided emergency management agencies the ability to come together from all over the Commonwealth, and various other states, to discuss best practices and lessons learned during past incidents and events and how Knowledge Center has proven to be a great incident management asset.
No comments:
Post a Comment