This first appeared as a PATImes column in August  2005.

 The END Was Near:  Results-Oriented, Collaborative Network Shows Its Success
by John M. Kamensky

October 1, 2002 was a bad day in the chicken industry.  That day, the US Department of Agriculture officially announced the detection of Exotic Newcastle Disease – END – in California.  It hadn’t been seen in 30 years in the US.  But in days it quickly spread to Arizona, Nevada, and Texas.  The Department of Agriculture swung into action. 

Within days, the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) was on site.  It is their job to eradicate animal and plant related diseases.  But the problem required a great deal of coordination and manpower.  APHIS turned to the Forest Service.  Why?  The Forest Service had developed a crisis-response organizational structure, called the Incident Command System, to fight forest fires.  They knew how to organize and respond to emergencies, and they had a lot of experience.

A new report by Dr. Donald Moynihan, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes the effort: “The disease was tracked, contained and ultimately eradicated by a taskforce that involved 10 major state and federal agencies, local governments, as well as temporary employees from the private sector.”

It wasn’t easy.  First, existing APHIS contingency plans assumed an outbreak of poultry disease would occur on large-scale commercial poultry farms.  But in this case, it erupted in illegal cock-fighting coops in the backyards of immigrant Mexicans in Southern California.  This not only made it difficult to track the disease, but the cultural and language barriers made it challenging to gain access to backyards to “depopulate” their prized chickens.  Adding to the challenge was the fact that the interagency task force rotated staff every three weeks from other parts of the country to help out. This created a continuity challenge in terms of on-the-ground team cohesion and sharing lessons learned.

The 1,600-person taskforce, however, adapted the Forest Service’s Incident Command System to share learning, codify experience, and communicate standard operating procedures for daily operations.  Moynihan also notes that technology played a key role:

“During the outbreak, the taskforce developed a rapid diagnostic test for END that reduced the delay between testing and results from over a week to a matter of hours.  This innovation proved an enormous benefit in tracking the disease and efficiently targeting resources to contain it.  A second technological innovation was the use of tasking software called the Emergency Management Response System.  The system was still in development at the beginning of the outbreak, but became essential to the rapid flow of information from field workers to the incident commanders.”  The availability of on-demand technology helped the taskforce to stay abreast of the fast-moving disease.

The use of the Incident Command System, however, is not limited to the Agriculture Department.  Its success in serving as a results-oriented and collaborative management structure for project-oriented initiatives has led to its adoption by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for hurricanes and other disasters.  In fact, in 2003 the President designated this network management approach to serve as the framework to be used in any homeland security incident as well.  Dubbed the National Incident Management System, it “. . . represents a core set of doctrine, principles, terminology and organizational processes to enable effective, efficient and collaborative incident management at all levels. It is not an operational incident management or resource allocation plan,” notes the Department of Homeland Security.  All federal agencies are required to use this approach; states and localities are encouraged to adopt the approach as well.  Oftentimes, the specific operational tool they use is the Incident Command System, because there is now extensive training material and a wide understanding of how it is used within the emergency response community.

 But what about its potential use beyond infrequent emergencies?  In the traditional approach to forming networks, trust and common understanding are key attributes and they tend to evolve over time. But in emergencies, there isn’t time to develop these informal bonds. The reason the Incident Command System works is that all partners would use a common language, a common operating structure and have a common understanding of roles.  The other reason is that there is a real burning platform around which all the network members can rally (sometimes, almost literally!). The other reason it works is that, in addition to a common operating system, there is substantial flexibility and autonomy of the members.  Individual agencies do not give up their existing authority, they just lend it to the network for the duration of the incident.  In the END incident, Congress appropriated a special fund to cover the costs, but in other networks, contributions come from a number of sources, especially in the form of staff and technical resources.

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What Are the Characteristics of the Incident Command System?

• Common terminology
• Modular organization – the incident-command develops in a top-down fashion in accordance to the needs of the incident and based on the decision of the incident commander.  If the incident expands different command units can be created.
• Management by objectives – actors should begin an Incident Command System by identifying overarching objectives, creating assignments, plans, procedures, and protocols to achieve these goals, identifying specific objectives, and documenting the results
• Reliance on an incident action plan
• Manageable span of control
• Pre-designated incident location and facilities – preplanning usually involves likely locations and facilities for Incident Command System operations
• Comprehensive resource management – clear processes for categorizing, ordering, dispatching, tracking, and recovering resources that give a timely account of resource utilization
• Integrated communications
• Establishment and transfer of command – clearly established at beginning with the agency holding primary jurisdictional authority for establishing leadership.
• Chain of command and unity of command – clear lines of authority where everyone has a designated supervisor
• Unified command – unified command necessary for effective coordination where multiple organizations are involved
• Accountability – to ensure accountability, all responders must check in via procedures established by the Incident Commander; the Incident Action Plan must be followed; everyone reports to a specific supervisor; limited span of control, and procedures in place to track resources
• Deployment – personnel or equipment respond only when requested or dispatched by an authority
• Information and intelligence management – a process must be established for gathering and sharing incident-related intelligence

Source:  Donald Moynihan, “Leveraging Collaborative Networks in Infrequent Emergency Situations,” 2005, and Department of Homeland Security.  National Incident Management System, Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004.  pp. 9-12.

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Dr. Donald Kettl, from the University of Pennsylvania, in his keynote address to the ASPA conference this past April, talked about the challenges of governing in the 21^st century. He described the increased focus on results, and how the expanded use of networks are a key strategy for getting there.  He described in vivid detail the attempts by Julie Gerberding, the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to shift her organization from a functional to a mission-focused organization.  He described her success in emergency situations where CDC used an approach similar to the Incident Command System. 

The real challenge for public leaders, however, is how to find a way to move from network-based projects to network-based services.  This requires a new way of defining accountability, that reaches beyond the use of hierarchical controls.  As Kettl notes, possibly the Baltimore CitiStat or the Virginia Department of Transportation’s dashboard approaches might be pioneer efforts in bridging the gaps in accountability that the traditional hierarchical authorities have provided in the past.  Like the CitiStat approach, the Incident Command System may provide lessons for how to organize to get results that matter.