APAN Improves Communication and Ensures Quick Response Times with Verint Community Platform
Results
Successfully introduced social communities, with steady growth that now includes more than 2,500 communities and thousands of blogs, calendars, forums, media galleries, and wikis.
Utilized social communities to inform community members about impending hazardous weather and to help those affected by natural disasters.
Opportunity
The All Partners Access Network (APAN) is an unclassified information-sharing service for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). It provides the DOD and mission partners with community spaces and collaborative tools to help plan, train, and respond to meet business requirements and mission objectives. APAN makes these tools available over the open internet, enabling individuals and organizations who do not have access to traditional DOD systems and networks to more effectively collaborate and participate in critical information sharing.
APAN supports multinational exercises, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response (HADR) operations, conferences, training, and information-sharing requirements of various agencies and organizations. It needed the ability for DOD personnel to request communities for military exercises, HADR events, training, work groups, and conferences. Having the ability to set up communities of interest quickly, with short notice, was a key requirement.
APAN needed a platform that would enable Web 2.0 collaboration and support across unclassified, global communities, which use a combination of forums, blogs, wikis, event registration and calendars, and media galleries. It also needed to provide a realistic military and HADR training event for dealing with massive casualties, earthquake aftershocks, and extensive infrastructure damage on a scope far beyond a single government’s capability to respond.
APAN faced several challenges when trying to come up with a community solution, including:
- Coordinating collaboration and enabling trainers to plan and execute an event with 2,750 participants.
- Using the same tools that would be used in real-life crisis events.
- Finding tools that were flexible and scalable to accommodate changing requirements for simulating real-life disaster scenarios.
- Adapting to shifts in strategies and requirements throughout the planning process and providing consistency over repeated events throughout the HADR scenario.
Solution
Using Verint Community* as a platform, APAN utilized Web 2.0 technology to provide event planning and HADR training for the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise. During the exercise, blogs were used by the exercise control group to disseminate instant announcements to all participants regarding simulated scenarios.
Participants could subscribe to these blogs via email or RSS to receive the most recent updates as soon as they were posted. Similar to what occurs in a real disaster, organizations and militaries participating in the operation could upload daily situation reports, helping to improve information sharing among all participants while reducing the duplication of efforts and cross-information.
Media galleries were used to provide easily downloadable information for dissemination, such as shelter, health, hospital, and critical asset updates. Wikis provided contact information for all non-governmental organizations that were assisting in the event. The contact information was linked to policy information, guidelines, and specific processes that needed to be followed to plan and request assistance.
*Formerly known as Telligent Community
Benefits
Using the Verint Community platform, RIMPAC teams were able to identify key components that would assist in a disaster response. In addition, disaster responders and coalition militaries were able to train on the same tool that would be used in real-world events.
APAN continues to use Verint Community to train responders and improve HADR collaboration. Its communities are online spaces where groups of people or teams can interact and collaborate on specific topics or events. Community owners control all aspects of the communities, including design, membership, access, and tools.
APAN provides two types of communities: Groups and Sites. With both types, owners have the ability to incorporate other APAN tools, such as chat, translation, and maps, to create unique collaboration environments.
APAN Groups focus on social engagements. The main applications (blogs, forums, media galleries, wikis, and calendars) provide a place for community members to contribute direct comments or feedback. Users can also tag content and people using #tags and @mentions. Pages are made up of a collection of drag-and-drop widgets, making it easy for owners with limited experience to customize their communities.
Today, APAN has a far better way to communicate important messages and ensure quick response times using the flexible Verint Community platform. The solution supports APAN community participants in the field by allowing access on any mobile device with responsive design. Moreover, it enables global, online collaboration with foreign military, government partners, and non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations, as well as the ability for community participants to collaborate in real-time with other communities and users.
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