Disaster Preparedness - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 323

Outside the system administration arena, teams from different public safety organiza-
tionssuchasfire,police,andparamedicscometogethertorespondtoemergenciesanddis-
asters. A system called the Incident Command System (ICS) has been developed to allow
this to happen productively in a way that can scale up or down as the situation changes.
ICS is designed to create a flexible framework within which people can work together
effectively. The key principles of ICS are as follows:
• Standardized Organizational Structure: An ICS team is made up of the Incident
Commander and subcommand systems: Operations, Logistics, Planning, Admin/
Finance, and optionally a Unified Command, a Public Information Officer, and a
Liaison Officer.
• Unambiguous Definition of Who Is in Charge: There is one and only one Incid-
ent Commander. Each person on an ICS team reports to only one supervisor for
that ICS incident.
• Explicit Delegations of Authority: The Incident Commander sets up certain key
branches, such as Logistics and Operations and Planning, and delegates those
functions to their commanders.
• Management by Objective: Clear objectives and priorities are established for the
incident. Tell people what you want to get done, not how to do it; let them figure
out the best way to get it done in the current circumstances.
• Limited Span of Control That Can Scale: Under ICS, a supervisor should not
have more than seven direct reports. Ideally, three to five individuals should report
to one supervisor. As the number of people involved grows, the organization ex-
pands and new supervisors are created. Through this approach, responsibilities stay
limited. Remember that this is a temporary organizational structure created for re-
sponding to this specific event. The same group of people might organize differ-
ently for a different event.
• Common Terminology and Organizational Framework: By using the ICS roles
and responsibilities as a common framework, different teams from different organ-
izations can understand clearly who is doing what and where their responsibilities
are.
A full description of ICS can be found on the U.S. Federal Emergency Management
Administration (FEMA) web site ( http://www.fema.gov/incident-command-
system ) .TheFEMAEmergencyManagement Institute publishesfreeself-studyandoth-
er training materials ( http://training.fema.gov/EMI/ ) . A more approachable
introduction is the Wikipedia article on ICS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Incident_command_system ) .