On any given day, local governments in your area are likely responding to at least one crisis. Hurricanes in the southeast require emergency responses from county, city, and other local governments to address safety issues, including issuing evacuation orders and communicating road closures. Wildfires in the west, blizzards in the northeast, and tornados in the midwest all require crisis response capabilities.

Local governments must be significantly more prepared for weather and climate disasters. NOAA’s report on climate disasters 1980-2024 shows 19 disasters through July 2024 compared to 28 events in 2023 and 18 in 2022. FEMA’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) Grant Program was designed to aid local governments, and the 2024 funding total was $103M in 2024, up from $89M in 2023 and $49M in 2022.

Crises go well beyond severe weather, climate disasters, and pandemics. Over the last month, multiple state and city governments responded to the CrowdStrike outage, while many cities had to address social unrest incidents at college campuses earlier this year. In the past year, crisis events included the collapse of a Baltimore bridge, New York City’s Times Square water main break, and a chemical release at a plant just south of Chicago. Then, there are the long-term crises of homelessness, drug abuse, and mental health that require ongoing management.

Local governments need an agile, easy-to-use, dynamic work management platform to help take control of the underlying incidents and manage the crises.

How Dynamic Work Management Improves Crisis Response

Crisis response in local government requires an organized plan, assigned responsibilities, strong communication protocols, and technology to aid response teams. Many government agencies invest money and time to prepare for a crisis by developing playbooks and organizing tabletop exercises.

These are critical steps to help people prepare for dealing with emotions, stress, and time pressures caused by a crisis. However, having the ability to rapidly create workflow tools, mobile interfaces, and reporting capabilities tailored to the crisis at hand can save lives, enable government officials to manage critical resources during a crisis, and improve communications with their citizens.

These technology capabilities are key to dynamic work management in local government, where organizations leverage low-code platforms to rapidly develop, easily deploy, and frequently update applications based on the changing nature of the crisis.

Building low-code crisis management applications

Below are the building blocks for developing a crisis management application template. When there is a crisis, this template can be updated to manage the crisis at hand by tailoring the data collected, workflow, and communications.

To prepare before any crisis, a low-code builder uses an AI smart builder to develop a template application to store data and manage the basic workflow needed during a crisis.

• Centralize contact information for departments, employees, and non-government resources needed during the crisis. Automation pipelines can extract this information from workforce management and primary systems.
• Establish a database with communication templates and recipient lists that response teams can use in times of emergency.
• Create a template incident management application with a basic workflow. Decide how to configure the workflow to enable incidents reported by government employees and local citizens.
• Develop reporting insights that emergency response employees will use during the crisis.

Once completed, the following steps will complete the development and prepare teams.

• IT oversees developing integrations with computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and other departmental record management systems.
• A change management leader trains emergency response employees on how to use the applications’ web and mobile interfaces.
• The application is secured in the cloud with AIC SOC controls for service organizations, HIPAA, DFARS, and other compliance credentials.

What makes this a dynamic work application is that during a crisis, the crisis response application template can be rapidly tailored to the nature of the emergency. Specifically:

• Workflow for impacted emergency response teams is turned on, and other resources not needed in the response are disabled.
• The incident management workflow is updated to capture data specific to the crisis. For example, a weather-related crisis needs location information collected with each incident, while an IT emergency may require high-level information on impacted systems.
• Communication templates are updated with specifics on the emergency and managed centrally to disseminate accurate and timely information.
• For larger-scale or long-term crises with many incidents, a configured data analyzer provides predictions to help prioritize issues and optimize resources.

How local governments thrive beyond the crisis

Dynamic work management can help governments beyond crisis management to become digital trailblazers. Consider these use cases:

• IT departments use contract management to track vendors, configure IT service management workflows, and track infrastructure upgrade projects all within one platform.
• Procurement centralizes a contract management workflow so departments can complete requests faster and receive updates efficiently.
• Public works and facilities management track time, conduct site safety audits, and track equipment maintenance with applications they manage themselves with minimal IT assistance.
• The key to thriving starts by changing internal mindsets:
• Technology can help local government improve their services and be a lifesaver during a crisis.
• Buying hundreds of SaaS solutions to cover every department use case is expensive to procure, complex to integrate, and hard to support.
• Governed citizen development can simplify building applications and deliver capabilities with a common user experience.

Governments making the leap to dynamic work management as part of their digital transformations win by improving services to their citizens, delivering a rewarding employee experience, and propelling government to a digital and AI-driven future.

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on mentoring digital trailblazers and building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO and a digital transformation influencer, with over 900 articles published on his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights on the Driving Digital Standup or during his weekly Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.