Most emergency plans start decaying the day they're approved.
Organizations struggle to maintain accurate, usable preparedness knowledge as people, plans, and operations change. I apply principles from knowledge management and systems design to build preparedness systems that stay accurate as organizations change, so that readiness doesn't depend on any one person's memory.
One source of truth. One continuous learning cycle.
Preparedness as a knowledge system, not a shelf of documents
I'm an emergency preparedness and response specialist working in public health. In practice, most preparedness programs manage documents: a continuity plan here, an operations plan there, contact lists and rosters scattered across drives. Each document restates the same facts, and every personnel change quietly breaks several of them at once.
My work treats preparedness as an information problem. Operational facts live in one place, plans consume them, and lessons learned from exercises and real incidents flow back to update them. The idea isn't new: fields like enterprise IT and knowledge management solved analogous problems decades ago. The work is translating those principles into a field that still runs on binders.
The system remembers so individuals don't have to.
How the model looks in practice
Turning a shelf of static plans into a living planning system
A mid-sized public agency with thirty planning documents, no shared source of truth, and a planner who just resigned. Rebuilding the suite around a single knowledge base.
Read the case study →Making corrective actions actually correct something
Exercise findings that used to end their lives in after-action reports, rerouted so each one updates the operational knowledge the plans are built on.
Read the case study →Emergency Preparedness and Response Specialist II at a metro-Atlanta public health district. MS in Emergency Management (4.0 GPA), Jacksonville State University. Pursuing Georgia Certified Emergency Manager certification, expected November 2026.