Prioritizing Community Resilience Solutions
The challenge communities, their electric and water utilities, businesses, and data centers face regarding extreme weather and wildfires: How do they prioritize the many potential ways to prepare for these threats, reduce their impact, and quickly recover from them?
The Challenge
Hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires, and other threats are taking their toll on communities. Community, utility, and business leaders are taking action to protect residents and businesses—and enhance recovery after these events. But these organizations contend with challenges to perform this emergency preparedness rapidly and cost effectively:
- An evolving array of risks
- Limited resources and time constraints
- Multiple facilities, assets, and critical infrastructures, as well as their interdependencies
Conventional Approaches
To address these emergency management challenges, communities, utilities, and businesses adopt various methods of prioritizing resilience solutions that yield highly-specific, tailored results. Some of these approaches involve time-consuming data gathering and in-depth planning assessments. Because these studies use forecasting and future scenarios, their results are inherently uncertain.
Our Approach
Our community resilience software (Streetlight™) complements these data-intensive assessments with a leading practices approach to enhanced resilience:
Solution gathering
Our resilience experts gather and update public-domain information on resilience-enhancing solutions that communities, utilities, and businesses have successfully implemented, as well as expert-recommended solutions. The solutions span electric power, transportation, water supply/wastewater, buildings, food, data center, and fire protection infrastructures—and their interdependencies.
Solutions for specific users
The community, utility, or business that uses our software (Streetlight™) completes a straightforward questionnaire. The software then instantaneously matches the most applicable, human-curated resilience solutions in our proprietary solution database to the needs and preferences of the specific community, utility, or business.
Hazard-agnostic or threat-specific solutions
Our software can deliver hazard-agnostic solutions that are applicable to a wide range of threats or risks (such as various types of extreme weather), as well as solutions that address specific threats, such as wildfires.
Streetlight is quite impressive and well done. It quickly delivers usable, valuable results for both technical and business users. You have to see it to believe it!
— Tom Clark MBCI, CBCP, CHS-III, CBRM / Business Continuity and Emergency Preparedness Global Leader (50 years)
Benefits of Our Method
- Leading practices. Our prioritized resilience solutions are based on actual implementations at communities, utilities, and businesses, or recommendations from resilience experts.
- Credible. The resilience solutions are vendor-agnostic, credible, and defendable to decision makers.
- Fast and low cost. Our process is quick, customized, and costs far less than detailed assessments.
- Actionable. For each resilience solution, we summarize its potential benefits and best online resource to learn more. This helps the community, utility, or business take the next step: implement the resilience solution.
- Scalable. Our software and methods can be scaled to additional risks (e.g., earthquakes or pandemics), critical infrastructures, vulnerabilities, and users.
- Extensible. Streetlight™ is one use case of a novel business consulting framework the team has developed: the Hoffman Extensible Leading Practices™ (HELP) framework. Our team can apply this framework to develop uses case for other business challenges besides resilience, including supply chain management, cybersecurity, data management and advanced analytics, climate and sustainability, AI integration and consulting, and others.
I am particularly intrigued with how Streetlight’s extensive, human-vetted dataset of resilience solutions makes it AI-ready. Also, I’m interested in how the tool and its approach can be extended to supply chain challenges that businesses face. That’s quite a unique combination.
— Robert Woodford / Leader in Business Continuity and Business Resilience (25 years)
Applications of our Software
Municipalities, electric and water utilities, businesses, and data centers can apply our tool to:
- Gain another perspective. Streetlight™ complements more lengthy, in-depth, data-intensive assessments by providing rapid results.
- Support decision making. Our software provides an independent third-party assessment that supports decision making on resilience initiatives.
- Empower workforce training. Streetlight™ and its comprehensive dataset of best practices is a useful training tool on resilience solutions.
- Meet other challenges. Our HELP business consulting framework can be used to develop leading practices approaches for other community, utility, and business challenges, such as supply chain management, cybersecurity, data management and advanced analytics, climate and sustainability, AI integration and consulting, and others.
Everybody Wins
- Improve human health and safety. Our resilience solutions can help save lives and protect residents and workers from unsafe conditions.
- Provide economic benefits. Our solutions can help reduce property losses, decrease recovery costs, enhance economic development, and ease community economic impact.
- Enhance quality of life. Our solutions can help improve confidence in community, utility, and business leadership, peace of mind of community members, and overall quality of life.