Staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a U.S. federal agency that coordinates disaster response when the president declares a national disaster, always got two floods at once. First, water covered the land. Next, a flood of paper, required to administer the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) covered their desks—pallets and pallets of green-striped reports poured off a mainframe printer and into their offices. Individual reports were sometimes 18 inches thick, with a nugget of information about insurance claims, premiums, or payments buried in them somewhere. Bill Barton and Mike Miles don’t claim to be able to do anything about the weather, but the project manager and computer scientist, respectively, from Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) have used WebFOCUS software from Information Builders to turn back the flood of paper generated by the NFIP. The program allows the government to work together with national insurance companies to collect flood insurance premiums and pay claims for flooding in communities that adopt flood control measures. As a result of CSC’s work, FEMA staff no longer leaf through paper reports to find the data they need. Instead, they browse insurance data posted on NFIP’s BureauNet intranet site, select just the information they want to see, and get an on-screen report or download the data as a spreadsheet. And that is only the start of the savings that WebFOCUS has provided. The number of times that NFIP staff asks CSC for special reports has dropped in half because NFIP staff can generate many of the special reports they need without calling on a programmer to develop them. Then there is the cost of creating BureauNet in the first place. Barton estimates that using conventional Web and database software to export data from FEMA’s mainframe, store it in a new database, and link that to a Web server would have cost about 100 times as much—more than $500,000—and taken about 2 years to complete, compared with the few months Miles spent on the WebFOCUS solution. When Tropical Storm Allison, a huge slug of sodden, swirling cloud, moved out of the Gulf of Mexico onto the Texas and Louisiana coastline in June 2001, it killed 34 people, most from drowning; damaged or destroyed 16,000 homes and businesses; and displaced more than 10,000 families. President George W. Bush declared 28 Texas counties disaster areas, and FEMA moved in to help. This was the first serious test for BureauNet, and it delivered. This first comprehensive use of BureauNet resulted in FEMA field staff readily accessing what they needed when they needed it and asking for many new types of reports. Fortunately, Miles and WebFOCUS were up to the task. In some cases, Barton says, “FEMA would ask for a new type of report one day, and Miles would have it on BureauNet the next day, thanks to the speed with which he could create new reports in WebFOCUS.” The sudden demand on the system had little impact on its performance, noted Barton. “It handled the demand just fine,” he says. “We had no problems with it at all. And it made a huge difference to FEMA and the job they had to do. They had never had that level of access before, never had been able to just click on their desktop and generate such detailed and specific reports.”
Questions for Discussion
1. What is FEMA, and what does it do?
2. What are the main challenges that FEMA faces?
3. How did FEMA improve its inefficient reporting practices?