TABLE OF CONTENTS The most basic rule about planning for emergencies is this: Keep it simple. The more complicated your emergency response plans are, the less likely they will be effective in a real emergency. It's sometimes easy to over engineer a plan in the relative calm of everyday business activities. When an emergency strikes, people are not likely to remember a lot of rules, procedures, and details. As you read in the preceding case study, "Crisis Communications 101," there are three basic rules to remember. It's pretty easy to remember three rules. So, when you create your emergency response and disaster recovery activities, you should strive to keep things simple. Once the emergency has subsided, you can begin to put more complex plans into place to begin restoring business operations.
We're not going to go into tremendous detail on emergency response, but we will provide a few pointers. If you want to create a detailed emergency response plan, you can work with local emergency responders who will be best able to provide details relevant to your community, its resources, and its geography. We'll also discuss computer incident response, disaster response, IT recovery, and business continuity.
In addition, we've provided several detailed checklists for emergency and disaster response and recovery in the final chapters of this section that you can use to develop your own detailed checklists.
Regardless of how your company is organized, managed, and run, your emergency management process should follow a very simple rule: assign clear...
