What is SAMSReady?
SAMS is the framework through which situational awareness is shared across community partnerships. SAMS is a web-based interface that allows organizations to define and categorize themselves within a community. SAMS provides your organization a web presence to which it can publish and query content. Organizations can reach out and recommend a partnership between itself and other organizations. Once two organizations agree, they each become part of the others network and have an inherent collaboration agreement. This agreement, virtual in nature, is the formation for an online community network. SAMS maintains interdependencies based on the relationships and information within a community network is inherently shared and made visible across its participants.
What can SAMSReady provide for my organization?
SAMS provides the ability to show proximity of local hazards, threats, and security issues as it relates to a community. Based on the event, SAMS will automatically push, pull or highlight situational awareness and recommend recovery actions in an automated effort to strengthen community resilience. SAMS incorporates the ability to intelligently share information, based on relevance, across the interdependencies of the respective partnerships.
Similar to the Emergency Support Function that coordinates and provides services within an Emergency Operations Center (EOC), non-profit and faith-based agencies also play a critical role in meeting the immediate needs and facilitating the long-term recovery of disaster affected citizens. The effectiveness of these efforts depends upon the extent to which these organizations, along with government agencies and other public and private entities, can share information in real time, coordinate essential activities and communicate with persons in need. The absence of data collection architecture across disparate systems, in particular across the formal social services network of non-profit and faith-based organizations, is a significant problem and threatens the operations of an emergency situation and jeopardizes the safety of all involved. These agencies must be able to work together and communicate situational awareness effortlessly to avoid a fundamental breakdown in delivery of social services before, during, and after a disaster.
How is SAMSReady different?
SAMS approach to situational awareness is not to merely serve as another incident management system or front-end application, but to broker available information and supplement it with value-added functions such as prioritization, categorization, mass dissemination, historical analysis, trend analysis and predictive analytics. This information must be unlocked and utilized to its full potential. Moreover, the gap in emergency preparedness is not merely a shortage of applications, but rather the organization of existing applications. The SAMS framework offers accessibility of information that aligns to a particular need instantly. The critical benefit is not new functionality, but integration with existing functionality. In order for technology to offer a true value proposition, it must have the ability to operate within and across the community with simplicity and ease.
Hillsborough County School Board
Department of Children and Families (DCF)
Japan Outreach Center
New Orleans Outreach Center
