Once again the Diva has asked John Plodinec (Resource Technolgies)   to review a new report on the topic of resilience. His report follows:

Recently, Claire asked me to look at a new report Resilience in Action. This report comes from the National Academy of Public Administration and IBM’s Center for the Business of Government. While the authors purport to be “preparing governments for future shocks,” government is rather tangential. The four case studies in the report are actually about governance: making and implementing decisions. The report highlights different ways that digital technologies can facilitate decision-making in a multi-partner environment.

Each case study is presented in a user-friendly format:

· The challenge – the potential shock and the players;

· The response – the playbook and the technology behind it;

· Lessons learned and critical response factors; and,

· What’s next. This section is a pleasant surprise – too often, these sorts of efforts seem to be “sound and fury signifying nothing.” For all of the efforts, there are a significant follow-ons identified.

In the first case study, a Norwegian team used the Strategyfinder software platform to bring together a diverse group of medical and health care professionals, and local government officials. The focus was on better managing the threats posed by the mutations of the coronavirus. The software allowed the group to gather remotely to identify risks and develop strategies to manage them. In other words, the software helped the team develop a better response than they could individually.

The second case study focused on the city of Nashville’s energy security. Nashville is vulnerable to blackouts, particularly during cold weather. A team consisting of Nashville, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Nashville Electric Service (NES), and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) used Synthetic Environment Twin to develop a model of the city and its energy usage. The model allowed the team to determine how the city’s power grid and system would respond to various outage scenarios. Most importantly, it allowed the team to take a fine-grained look at the impacts of extreme weather: down to the level of individual homes. Here the digital technology enabled the team to gain a better understanding of the cascade of consequences if power were lost.

The third case study (perhaps the most interesting) showed how digital technology helped Moldova to manage the flood of immigrants from Ukraine. In the wake of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, ~100,000 Ukrainians sought refuge in Moldova. As we in the US have seen with our own flood of immigrants, it is difficult to provide essential services to those strangers in a strange land. The Moldovans developed a software platform that provided credentials for each refugee, and served as an information hub for them to learn how to access essential services. The software platform thus became an essential part of the Modovan response to the refugee crisis.

In the fourth case study, the pandemic confronted the Dutch and German healthcare systems with a difficult challenge. In normal times, the Dutch (with limited ICU beds) transferred patients across the border to Germany when necessary. The pandemic transformed an occasional trickle into a deluge. Essential information for each patient could not be reliably delivered, let alone used, on an ad hoc basis. The Dutch Ministry of Health; the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany directed the University Hospital Münster to develop a digital platform that hospitals near the border could use to facilitate patient transfer. This was later expanded to several other European countries