Eric Holdeman:
I am Eric Holdeman. And this is Disaster Zone, a podcast about emergencies and disasters of all =me,
Disaster Zone will bring you interviews with people, dealing with all aspects of disasters and what causes
them to help people and organiza=ons are dealing with their impact.
Here's today's program. This podcast is being sponsored by Dynamis, a leading provider of informa=on
management soDware and security solu=ons. You can ﬁnd them at dynamis.com.
Welcome to today's podcast. With me today is Hans J. Scholl who is a full professor in the Informa=on
School at the University of Washington.
I will be talking about the eﬀects of WebEOC, a crisis informa=on management tool and informa=on
systems in general.
Welcome Hans. And I know you're in Spain.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl
I am. Thank you for having me, Eric. And it's your morning. It's my aDernoon here.
Eric Holdeman
Okay. What =me is it there? 7:00 AM here on the West Coast
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
Shortly aDer 4:00 PM.
Eric Holdeman:
Okay. Well, there you go. We'll get this over and you can have dinner, you and I have discussed WebEOC
and informa=on systems quite a bit. And before we get into that though, and the WebEOC plaVorm, howabout geWng a brief synopsis? What are your academic creden=als in your area of exper=se because you
are an authority in this area.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:Oh, thank you. Well, I'm a faculty, as you said, at the informa=on school, I joined the Informa=on Schoolin 2003. My major areas are of interest in the broader ﬁeld of informa=on management are in par=cular
digital government. And from using technology in government, I got a\racted and basically my nose waswrapped into disaster informa=on management. When I received a grant from the Na=onal Science
Founda=on to look into how mobile devices in the early two thousands could support ﬁeld opera=ons.
And that was when I came into this kind of study. I also do user usability studies ,and I'm also on theboard of the ISCRAM society, which is the society for Informa=on Systems for Crisis and Response
Management, an academic ins=tu=on.
Eric Holdeman:
Okay. Well, certainly you have a depth of both knowledge to begin with and then some experience in theﬁeld and creden=al there. How ddid you get interested in the disaster informa=on management system,
and, in WebEOC in par=cular?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:When we got that grant and studied Sea\le Public U=li=es, and I came across disaster prepara=on. By
that =me, I also became aware of that I had moved into an area, the Paciﬁc Northwest, is highly
compromised poten=ally by, in par=cular, of major earthquakes. And actually then those two things
together made me very interested in it, and it is s=ll also part of digital government. Then I began to
study disaster responses of professional responders, and I was pre\y much interested in the beginning,
because I come from the informa=on side of things, in situa=onal awareness and how a common
opera=ng picture shapes up for professional responders. And when you look into that, you immediately
ﬁnd another important aspect of our response management. And that is all the managerial challenges
that come with it, par=cularly when it comes to mul=-jurisdic=onal coordina=on, collabora=on between
agencies. With regard to informa=on management situa=onal awareness is key. If you don't have that.,and speaking of an emergency, an if you don't have that, you don't know where to apply your resources,
the areas that need help areas that may be screaming for help, but aren't hit as hard as other areas. I
mean, it's just key to everything I think is knowing the situa=on. I mean, whether it's in combat or in adisaster, that's no diﬀerent from the military in that regard. .
Eric Holdeman:
So you studied disasters and even par=cipa=ng in a large disaster excise to obtain some ﬁrsthandinforma=on. I mean, as a, as an observer oﬀ this if you were going to design a disaster informa=on
management system, what would be its major characteris=cs?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:In the US we work, and I guess that is a a solid thing, now under the Na=onal Incident Management
System’s (NIMS) doctrine and as part of it, ICS, the Incident Command System. That is the doctrine
under which basically emergency management and disaster response management are conducted in the
United States. It is this unifying doctrine. And there is a core document of 2008. It's a very interes=ng
document from back then. And I cannot agree more with those NIMS architects. They said, an
informa=on system that serves under NIMS for emergency management has to be interoperable, bothver=cally and horizontally. It has to be easy to use, simple, and it should be even simplis=c. And here iswhat I add: the informa=on systems should be NIMS standardized, and then here it comes, it should be
scalable. That is what these people back then already deeply understood. It should be ﬂexible. It should
be reliable and robust, so it cannot break down easily. It should be able to be used in a singlejurisdic=on response, as well as in mul=ple-jurisdic=on responses. It should be adaptable, and I foundthat so foresighVul from those NIMS architects, to new technology, and it should be safe and wellshielded. It may not be an open plaVorm where everybody can hack into. And so those were therecommenda=ons back then, and I cannot agree more. Those are the principles for any system that weuse, be it locally, County, State, or na=onally.
Eric Holdeman:
Okay. And , what I observed is that I've been through several itera=ons of disaster management
informa=on management systems, and I've par=cipated in several failed eﬀorts, and they've evolved
over =me and that, and but I'm not an IT person on that certainly. As a university professor, yhave you
looked at diﬀerent informa=on management systems, soDware plaVorms, and what have you discovered
about them in general or in par=cular?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
The current de-facto standard is WebEOC. It is used in many jurisdic=ons all over the country. It isinteres=ng to go back and look at how it came to that. In 2002, the Na=onal Ins=tute of Jus=ce (NIJ),

which is the research arm of the Department of Jus=ce, per the request of States did an analysis.
Notably, it was not FEMA that led to the inves=ga=on then. This NIJ report then led to the situa=on that
more and more States followed that recommenda=on, which was not really a full recommenda=on, butrather feature comparison survey only. They never performed load tests, or scalability tests, or anything.
All the points that the NIMS architects elaborated previously men=oned were never tested.
Eric Holdeman:
When you say, look, test, do you mean like the stress stuﬀ?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
If you have N number of jurisdic=ons into opera=ng horizontally and ver=cally, you want to know whereis the breaking point? You need to know what is the lowest bandwidth, with which you can s=ll haveopera=ons. Now, what I found in the studies is that besides WebEOC, you see all kinds of systems, forexample, homegrown systems, SharePoint-based opera=ons, and at the University of Washington, myuniversity, with their own Emergency Opera=on Center, they use a web-based spreadsheet that helps
them organize their responses. And there are completely unstructured systems, such as email, and very
recently, there is a new commercial system, VEOCI, but we have not really looked into that one and havenot seen it in opera=on. It seems to be a rising new star on the horizon provide by a company opera=ng
form Connec=cut. And there seem to be quite a number of jurisdic=ons around the country that appear
dissa=sﬁed with the situa=on that they've found themselves in with a WebEOC, or they wanted to move
forward for other reasons. And they seem to now begin to test that new system. But I have to say, we
have not had our hands on that on that and have not seen how it is working.
Eric Holdeman:
Well, my observa=on has been that companies spring up, they have a good idea. They think they have a
be\er mouse trap to do this. And they likely to their local emergency management agency, whether it'sin Pennsylvania or another state, like say here, Connec=cut and they'd say, well, we're not that happy
with WebEOC, so we'll try this. So they get this foothold and then it's used in that general area, but thenit's very diﬃcult to swim against any technological =de, you know, and someone came in and was goingto replace MicrosoD 365. It would be a ba\le, right? And, to have something like that happen at the end.
And, we saw that with Gmail, replacing Outlook, if you remember those days, a few years back, 10 years
or so, but there's a lot of resistance to change and familiarity, even if you're not happy with it, causes
people to use it. So you've done a deep dive into WebEOC and looked at it from a technologicalstandpoint. And you also observed it being used in a larger disaster site. So what did you learn fromthat?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:To sum it up, WebEOC is highly conﬁgurable, so you can have your own tailored version. However, thesoDware has gone through several versions which are not necessarily compa=ble. And as long as you
only talk about an everyday emergency or something that gets a li\le larger, maybe, and it's s=ll in one
jurisdic=on and the jurisdic=on doesn't have to communicate outside, then you may be ﬁne with
WebEOC, even though I come to a few sort of limita=ons in a moment, I don't want to make it too
technical.
Eric Holdeman:
Dealing with people like me..

Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
Exactly. For the small scale, for the single-jurisdic=on response WebEOC, despite the limita=ons that I
will talk about, may work quite nicely. The breaking point though comes very, very quickly. The moment
you scale it up and go, even into something like the 2014, OSO-SR530 landslide situa=on, where you
have mul=ple jurisdic=ons all of a sudden, the State, the County the locals, FEMA, and they all have tocommunicate, and they have to work together and already there and then, it was not working well,diﬀerent versions and no interconnec=vity. And let me talk about the limita=ons. WebEOC has a veryhierarchical design. So you basically work with so-called Boards and you organize them from a user
perspec=ve into a hierarchy, and it quickly becomes cumbersome, and there is no exit bu\on, if you
want to go back in the hierarchy to the next board.
So for people who don't use the system on an everyday basis., it will be diﬃcult to handle, par=cularly
under the stress of an emergency response, par=cularly if the emergency lasts longer.
The other major limita=on is that WebEOC is basically a logging system. It is sequen=al. Yes, something
happens. Somebody puts something into the system, and the log becomes longer and longer and longer.
Now we have a shiD change, and now the next shiD comes in. And basically what they have to do is to
get up to date by going through the whole logged record. And, “ah, here is where we are now,” and thelonger, the whole thing lasts, the more it adds. And there are no search and meaningful ﬁlter func=ons
that work well, there is only a li\le bit of visualiza=on. Moreover, there are many inconsistencies also in
the internal design. The soDware people call that the so called “tech debt” if you do not develop
something cleanly, it haunts you aDer a while.
And that is what we are seeing in WebEOC. Now, the breaking point during the 2016 Cascadia Rising
Cascadia Exercise came when thirty coun=es wanted to connect to the State, and aDer one or twoconnected, and the whole system broke down completely. Obviously, Washington State has understoodthat. And, and they are try trying to host the system in a diﬀerent place. We can only hope that the next
=me we get to this kind of stress, it will work be\er. But here's another aspect, the point that I also havemade when we come to larger disasters, then we have to understand that part of the cri=cal
infrastructure, in par=cular, the communica=on infrastructure will be gone. As a consequence, we haveto begin to rethink scalability.
The biggest concern that I have with WebEOC is both its safety and its security. Its safety and security areso bad that this issue even came before Congress. For example, you cannot directly communicate fromyour State WebEOC with FEMA’s WebEOC, or with a County WebEOC. What you can do instead is you ﬁleyour resource request from the State to FEMA if you have a FEMA WebEOC account as a State. So, 50
States have 50 accounts with FEMA. What happens on the FEMA side is when they receive the resource
request, they enter it into their FEMA system manually. That is grotesque in the 21st century. So, thevarious WebEOC systems cannot send safely resource requests directly into the FEMA WebEOV system,
even though they are both using the same system .
In 2018, FEMA said again before Congress that theey cannot do it diﬀerently, even though it entails somuch double work, error-prone double work, because it is unsafe to connect WebEOC systems directlywith each other. And that is a safety and security ﬂaw par excellence.
Eric Holdeman:
Okay. So, why do you think so diﬃcult come up with a more func=onal system? You said already, people
are invested in what they have?.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:That is correct. However, I want to look at that from a diﬀerent angle, and I guess that discussion has notoccurred yet. These systems like WebEOC, and I am not talking now about the everyday emergencies,
but as we see the massive wildﬁres now in the West in mul=ple States, it really a disaster of magnitude.
Resources have to be coordinated, and lives are at stake. So at this magnitude a system is missioncri=cal, it is mission-cri=cal for our na=on’s safety. We have always agreed that we need a military, andthat military cannot be a military of mercenaries, we rather have to do it ourselves to be safe. We haveto have people who give their oaths on the cons=tu=on, and they want to defend the country no ma\erwhat. So, what we do basically is in this par=cular area where safety and security are at stake, we haveforgo\en this simple principle. When our na=onal security is at stake we do things diﬀerently. That is
why we have our own military. We now have larger and larger disasters, and therefore we have torethink and understand that this is not an arena where we can leave it to commercial interests to help us
out. As an example, Amazon, Walmart, as well as the military have their very own soDware with which
they do command and control.
There is no commercial vendor in there that writes the soDware for them. Also in the private sector, as I
said, Amazon or Walmart, their logis=cs systems and their whole system of opera=ons is their strategic
advantage, embedded in it is their knowhow, and, of course, they do that themselves. The same, I say,applies here in terms of the mission cri=cality. Mission-cri=cal soDware like this is not a commodity like a
car that you can exchange for just another one. You can buy a car from vendor X or a similar one fromvendor Y, and you s=ll can drive as well. However, mission-cri=cal systems are very diﬀerent animals.
And, so, I advocate that this needs to be changed in the way of how we think about this type of systems.
Eric Holdeman:
You've advocated for a na=onal system, that everyone is in it's, as you talked about, really scalable forcatastrophic disasters and is the true standard right now, wherever you'll see, it's the standard just basedon use. It was one of the earlier ones and go widely adopted. It was fairly cheap to use. So you spread
broadly, but it's not a mandatory system. So you've got 3000 coun=es, you got the 50 States plus
territory, and everybody's using diﬀerent pieces that, and there's, they'll standardiza=on within and evenweb you'll see for how it's being used. So you've advocated for a na=onal soDware standard that's
mandated and use. So tell us about that.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
I think this should be a na=onal eﬀort, but it must be a joint and coordinated eﬀort from all levels ofgovernment. It is not that the Feds can take the lead here and say, we now give you a system that wehave cooked up and you please take it. There is so much knowledge on the base levels, since every
disaster is local. So, the knowledge about all that is local, but then come all the coordina=on problems.
And that is where you have to have all the other areas and all the other levels of governments involved.
And this needs to be an ini=a=ve that comes basically from all levels of government. I don't know what
the best organiza=onal format for that would be. Certainly, some major funding should come from thefederal level.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
And that is jus=ﬁable because the cost savings through such a system would be tremendous. I just give
you an example. On the other side of Lake Washington is the City of Bellevue. Bellevue is the lead inwhat is called the eCityGovAlliance. That is a number of municipali=es that put their eﬀorts and theirresources together. And they built systems for all of the ci=es. And the cost drama=cally came down. The
exper=se of the government was in there, not something from outside and, and they were in charge of
their systems. And that could be a role model for something that we could then be built on a na=onal

level. And that could then also lead to the consistency, not only in architecture and design, but also in
implemen=ng the NIMS doctrine, the Na=onal Incident Management System and the Incident Command
System Doctrine.
Eric Holdeman:
We are geWng near the end here, but I just, if she could give a quick comment, because I've fought thisfor many years: People develop a system and they keep adding alcohol and bells and whistles. It makes
it so complex that someone can't come in and intui=vely use the system without signiﬁcant training. And
that just doesn't happen. So what's the solu=on to that?
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
The point is what all vendors dream of. I once worked for Apple. I once worked for a company like Data
General. Whenever you have people in a lock-in, for example, take also MicrosoD, they are very happy
because from that moment of customer lock-in you are beginning to print money because now you
decide what changes are made. You decide when upgrades are made, you decide the cost. That is thewhole thing. And again, the mission cri=cality of these systems should open our eyes in that we cannot
do this, what we normally do for commodity products anywhere, that we leave our safety and security at
the mercy of commercial vendors. We have to change our thinking here, because currently we are in a
lock-in mainly with WebEOC.
Eric Holdeman:Okay, well. Anything else you'd want to say to, emergency managers who are probably one of my majoraudiences here, and I'm sure this other soDware developers will be watching this, listening to it too.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl:
I can only repeat, I guess, robustness of the system, scalability of the system, safety and security of thesystem are the key elements, and they are not fulﬁlled by the current systems. We also have to reallyconsider oﬄine opera=ons and scaling in various ways. In a big disaster you are back to pencil andnotepad and you have to scale up and down. And the current wildﬁres have now shown us again thatmost severe emergencies become the norm, so we have to have something that is robust, whichcurrently we have not.
Eric Holdeman:Okay, well, listen, this has been great connec=ng Intercon=nentally here this morning. You know, I, I havea WebEOC survey out there now, and perhaps when we get a li\le bit more data and we can do a checkin with you and see what those results show, and then share that with our audience. Also, since I thinkmaybe their appe=te will have been wedded by listening to this one podcast. So hopefully you'll do thatin the future with me.
Prof. Hans J. Scholl
Absolutely.
Eric Holdeman
Okay. Well, thank you. Be safe. This brings us to the end of this podcast. Thank you for joining me today
and sharing your experience and exper=se and informa=on management systems, a reminder toeveryone to be faith. Think about how disaster might impact you and your family and what you can doabout it. Now, before that happens. Thanks to Amanda again soon. And bye bye.
Thanks for listening to today's Disaster Zone Podcast, tune in again, soon for more informa=on on all
aspects of exams and what people and organiza=ons are doing about them can also check out theDisaster Zone blog at www.disaster-zone.com.