Besides my professional work in the networking field, I do a lot of volunteer emergency services work. For example, I'm one of only about 40 fully-qualified air search and rescue Incident Commanders in the California Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, and I help teach community disaster preparedness classes for the Mountain View Fire Department. So, I have a fair understanding of the tools (methods, structures, and principles) that such agencies use to organize themselves to deal with emergencies, and I've long pondered how some of those tools could be applied to emergencies in information technology.

I've been invited to give a 90 minute talk on the topic at the USENIX/SAGE LISA Conference in San Diego on Thursday, 8 December 2005, and I'll be giving a preview of the talk at the BayLISA meeting on Thursday, 20 October 2005:

Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department

Have you ever wondered how fire departments organize themselves on the fly to deal with a major incident? How they quickly and effectively coordinate the efforts of multiple agencies? How they evolve the organization as the incident changes in scope, scale, or focus? They accomplish all this by using the Incident Command System (ICS), a standardized organizational structure and set of operating principles adopted by most emergency agencies nationwide. In this talk, Brent will introduce the concepts and principles of ICS, and discuss how these can be applied to IT events, such as security incidents and service outages.

Please join me for one or both of these talks!

Slides from the BayLISA talk on Thursday, 20 October 2005:

• PowerPoint web presentation format
  
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format