Enterprise Architecture and Experience on Disaster Management
Note : This blog is originally contributed to AEA Delhi Chapter
A disaster is any event, natural or man-caused, which creates an intense negative impact on people, goods and services, and/or the environment, and exceeds the affected community’s internal capability to respond, prompting the need to seek outside assistance.
Disaster management is all about knowing the right data, at the right time and initiating correct preventive and handling measures in moments of pressure. Optimum understanding of area, right amount of pre-planning and effective mobilization of during and post event resources all contribute towards mitigating effects of calamity.
In this context, On 31st Oct 2020, Association of Enterprise Architecture (AEA) Delhi India Chapter organized an insightful webinar on the topic “Enterprise Architecture Mindset and Experience on Disaster Management”.
It was an enlightening session for all of us to learn from Mr Muraleedharan Manningal
About the Speaker :
Mr Muraleedharan Manningal is a result oriented techno-business leader with over two decades of global experience in strategy formulation, pioneering and managing large and complex business and IT transformation programs, setup and deliver large IT application portfolios, Infrastructure and Operations, organisational and operations setup, budget implementation, relationship management, team leadership, strong acumen in product roadmap and customer management for sustainable growth.
His Professional highlights are as below :
• Expertise in institutionalizing policies, processes and standards.
• Build and lead high performance teams in Technology and Programme management areas.
• Digital Technology and business solution evangelisation and setup Centres of Excellence (CoE).
• Experienced on Digital Technologies — Big data, Block chain, IoT and AI.
• Created of EA blueprints and enterprise Transformation, experience in TOGAF
• Large-scale and complex portfolio governance.
• Strong experience in Life and General Insurance, BFS and Government sectors
• Successfully managed Digital transformation programmes with large Insurers
• Driving innovation, building new products and creating new ventures.
• Enterprise Architecture — Set policies to set strategic direction, successful execution experience.
• Setting up large-scale global operations.
• Executive customer engagement.
• Leadership and organizational skills developed to lead and manage large global team.
• Spearheaded project delivery with tight timelines in a complex environment with latest technologies.
Mr. Murli had shared one of his challenging experiences while working with Govt Sector on advisory role. Heavy and unprecedented rains have caused havoc in Kerala in August 2018, many people have lost their lives in the torrential rains that have caused flooding in many areas of Kerala. The worst flooding in living memory inundated large parts of the state, in addition to causing landslides across the fragile Western Ghats mountain range. In the wake of the flooding, hundreds of people lost their lives, with many more injured and hundreds of thousands of people forced to evacuate to temporary shelters. One of the dams Idukki of capacity 780 mw was opened for the first time. Water level was going up every 10 hrs in catchment area. Many districts were impacted. Literally, on highway People were seen using boats
He has used Enterprise Architect Mind set in driving the solution and managing that, which was remarkable and outstanding.
Coordination with Disaster Management Team and handling multiple departments was quite complex due to bureaucracy. Communicating lacs of affected people in flood like situation was one of the most important factors. He along with few students and volunteers in conjunction with state government and district administration created a rescue platform which was extensively used by mass of people with almost 17 million hits. It has helped 1.2 million of people affected in relief camps.
Architectural principles are placed before the data collection from lacs of volunteered and persons affected and the various departments. Ease of collection, relevancy and usability, portability was kept in mind during this process.
Portal was designed and created with the help of open source tools and cloud environment initially by 8 students in day. It become all-time hits in 3 days’ time.
90 plus developers across the globe helped to expand the system to handled 60 thousand volunteers and millions of affected people. Github and slack were exclusively used .
Simplicity, uniformity, and usability was on top of mind so that data is used by all the department in meaningful manner. Data was gathered in a distributed manner which was published on dashboard with call center integration.
6 things that helped to realize maximum benefits were as below :
- Understanding of the Big picture
- Align with the vision
- Deep understanding of the Enterprise — Government Department functions and Interactions
- Extendibility
- Understanding the needs of stakeholders
- Effective use of data
The session was followed by detail discussion over the flood like situation handling in other states. If there are building block available in one state, then the same can be implemented in other States.
Mr. Aurobind showed a presentation how Gujarat government has established Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority (GSDMA) immediately after the 26th January 2001 earthquake. GSDMA was initially mandated to implement the gigantic task of rehabilitation and reconstruction programme in the earthquake affected areas of the State and simultaneously act as a nodal agency to plan and implement pre-disaster preparedness and mitigation activities including training and capacity building of all the stakeholders involved in disaster management
As per the recommendations from National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Government of India, New Delhi, the State was requested to set up State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) teams in the State on similar lines of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams set up by the Central Government. GSDMA, through the Home Department, initiated the task of carving out SDRF teams out of the existing SRPF companies in the State.
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