Michael Chumer, PhD, is Director of the Technical Committee of the NJ Business Force's Business Emergency Operations Center (BEOC) as well as Director of the NJIT Emergency Management and Business Continuity graduate program.  Mike is a research professor in the Department of Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology, specializing in Homeland Security and Emergency Management.  He will be presenting several different aspects of his on-going programs on information sharing on our UICDS biweekly call this Thursday.

New Jersey BEOC

The BEOC is a private sector organized, managed, and staffed emergency coordination/operations 
center focused on all-hazards disaster prevention, preparation, response, and recovery. Its goal is 
to make the private sector self-reliant and self-sufficient during emergencies and disasters through 
information sharing and shared situational awareness. 
The NJ BEOC is being jointly developed through a 
collaborative effort between academia, led by the NJ 
Institute of Technology (NJIT), and business, as represented by the New Jersey Business Force (NJBF).  The NJ BEOC is recognized by FEMA as one of the leading examples of public-private cooperation for emergency management. 

On our last biweekly tutorial everyone learned that a written sharing agreement is NOT required to participate in UICDS. Any type of memorandum of understanding is strictly the decision of the participating agencies and jurisdictions.

UICDS, itself, embodies all of the sharing agreements within the technology.  A simple addition to the Agreement Service with one line in an XML document is all UICDS needs to share data among applications.  This was the point made by Jim Morentz at the beginning of our last tutorial. Tutorial viewers then saw how the UICDS AdminConsole is used to easily create the needed sharing agreements.

But we recognize that sometimes organizations feel a need to put in writing an agreement about sharing information. To help in those cases, the UICDS Team has gathered different types of information sharing agreements and offers them as examples - not as recommendations or requirements - but just as examples for those who might want to create documents to memorialize their agreements to share.  

In the tutorial we took a look at three levels of sharing agreements, including documents to support each: 

• Data Exchange Workbook - This document is used by organizations to identify what information they wish to share.  In this form of sharing documentation, the workbook itself is the way to memorialize who will share with whom.  No further documents need to be prepared.
• Ancillary Agreement - You ALREADY have made the agreements; use them!  Mutual Aid Agreements and even statutory authority define who shares with whom.  All you need is a single, short document that states that you will share information as needed to carry out the Mutual Aid Agreement or the statute.  If desired, you can reference the UICDS Data Compliance Guide to identify what kinds of data will be shared.
• Formal Memorandum of Agreement - Several pages of legally binding agreement combined with all of the UICDS data entities and exchange standards will give you a document for lawyers to enjoy.  This example of a MOA is provided to get you started if the fully documented path is the one your organization needs to take.

Electric, Gas, and Water Utility Information Sharing Through UICDS - February 23

There is a new collaboration opportunity unfolding between utility and emergency management operations driven by ongoing adoption of interoperability standards in the public security and utility operations domains. This new opportunity was described by Mark Wald of Utility

Integration Solutions (UISOL) at the DistribuTECH conference held in San Antonio in January.  DistribuTECH is the leading annual conference for Smart Grid, encompassing automation and control systems, IT, Transmission and Distribution engineering, power delivery equipment, and water utility technology.

Mark will be bringing his experience to the UICDS Biweekly Tutorial.  "When UISOL presented this vision to the utility industry at the 2012 DistribuTECH conference," Mark said, "we made the point that interoperability is now achievable with reasonable effort and risk because of UICDS and the the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Common Information Model (CIM). 

"As with the CIM, we expect it will take time for UICDS to become a "required" standard, but as it gains acceptance and support, it will enable the creation of new solutions and opportunities that were not possible before. UISOL is counting on wide adoption of UICDS, and strong support from Federal agencies and DHS, as we build a center of excellence and business practice for utility and emergency operation interoperability."

Video Collaboration Demonstrates the Framework for Interoperability - March 8

Brian Holsonbake, President of SkyLine Network Engineering, will present the operational view of the Framework for Interoperability presented on a recent call by John Contestible, Assistant Program Manager for Homeland Protection of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

If you will recall (or view the presentation), John talked about why information sharing is important to successfully dealing with large scale events and how a lack of public safety communications systems interoperability is a major impediment. He described how a conceptual framework of information layers (Data, Integration, and Presentation layers) is useful to developing solutions to the lack of interoperability.  At the conclusion of his presentation, John talked about a pilot program underway in video information sharing which will be the topic of Brian's presentation.

Bryan takes the Framework for Interoperability concept and turns it into an operational reality with video information sharing.  Using the concepts of information layers, and recent integration with UICDS, Skyline has achieved significant video interoperability.

We are please to welcome Brian who has consistently been involved in technology consolidation and interoperability. At SkyLine, Brian is the lead architect for unifying multiple networks within the Maryland Department of Transportation and was also part of the team that developed networkMaryland. He will talk about these experiences and the integration of SkyLine technologies with UICDS.

SkyLine's integration with UICDS enables incidents to be immediately associated with the nearest cameras to provide decision-makers with the best view possible.