Michigan's Critical Incident Management System (CIMS) - E Team
In mid-1998 the Emergency Management & Homeland Security Division of the Michigan State Police (EMHSD/MSP) examined alternate operation arrangements for the State Emergency Operation Center (SEOC). The SEOC had been operating with a paper-based information management system since the early 1980's. Major disasters in 1997 and 1998 stressed the system when trying to keep pace with both response and recovery operations while using manual processes and paper documents. Interoperability had become a critical problem that affected an efficient response.

To address these issues the EMHSD contracted with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to analyze SEOC operations and design, develop and implement an integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) and an enterprise-wide CIMS for the State of Michigan. The E Team web-based CIMS software application was selected as the preferred information management tool. EMHSD purchased an Enterprise Level License for the E Team deployment to the governor's office, all 20 state agencies, over 110 local emergency management programs, numerous local police, fire, hospital/medical facilities, non-governmental organizations, and other critical infrastructures within Michigan. Because E Team is a web-based application, users can access the system regardless of their location. E Team enables the state to easily share disaster response and recovery information in real time with affected local response organizations, federal agencies, neighboring states, the Province of Ontario, or appropriate non-governmental response and recovery organizations such as the American Red Cross.

E Team allows users to summarize and track emergencies in Incident reports, enter messages in the Duty Log reports, monitor Resource Requests and Critical Assets, view Agency and Jurisdiction readiness in their respective Situation reports, view incidents and other geographic information on a map, as well as upload and access Reference Documents right from the E Team system. These are just a few capabilities of E Team as it is a very dynamic system that facilitates communication and data exchange within and between organizations.

How the statewide system is structured
EMHSD is currently in the process of creating a statewide E Team system with several servers distributed across the state for users to access. All of these servers will replicate with each other so that they all will contain the same information. This builds in a great factor of redundancy across the system so that if one server goes down a user can log into another E Team server and continue with the response. There are currently several E Team servers housed at the State Emergency Operations Center that SEOC and State Agency users can access. There are also six regional servers in place in Grand Traverse, Isabella, Midland, St Clair, and Wayne Counties as well as the City of Detroit. Local governments and other local response organizations are able to access the regional servers at this time, once they have been through an E Team training session.

How does a jurisdiction or organization become part of the E Team system?
During the first wave of deployment of E Team EMHSD is working on getting all local emergency management programs on the system as well as state agency emergency management representatives. Once each emergency management program has a presence on the system we will work on pushing the system out to first responders and other local response organizations.

Each user on E Team must have a username and password to gain access to the system. Each user must first attend an E Team training session in order to receive their login information. There are E Team training sessions available through the EMHSD/MSP that are conducted at the SEOC. There are also several local E Team trainers throughout the state that can arrange a local E Team training session.
 

Who to contact for more information