mission needs.  FEMA's approach to defining requirements to support 

development of its principal disaster management system has not been 

effective, however.  When the CIO office began to develop NEMIS in 1995, 

the office documented a set of system requirements.  But, an EP&R CIO 

official noted that headquarters personnel were usually responsible for the 

requirements definition process and that not all of FEMA's stakeholders were 

involved.  Consequently, once NEMIS became operational, the system 

automated a process that did not reflect how FEMA personnel actually behave 

during disasters.  To address this disparity, the EP&R CIO office had users 

come in after the initial release of NEMIS to look at each individual module 

and suggest system changes. 

Lacking an effective means to provide input to NEMIS development, users 

have been forced to rely on systems that do not effectively meet their 

requirements, modify their processes, or resort to manual workarounds.  For 

example, after an incident occurs, regional officials are supposed to use 

NEMIS' preliminary damage assessment module to evaluate destruction and 

losses due to disasters, and subsequently submit that information to 

headquarters, along with state requests for federal assistance.  However, a 

regional official said that emergency personnel do not use this module to the 

fullest extent possible.  Instead of directly entering the damage assessments 

into the system, emergency personnel collect and fax the information for 

review and consideration.  The official said that it is easier and faster to 

submit the damage assessments in hard copy than use the poorly designed 

NEMIS module.   

The EP&R CIO now recognizes the need to improve efforts to reach out to IT 

users across the directorate and has established forums for discussing and 

defining system requirements.  For example, the EP&R CIO office has 

assigned each system a customer advocate and a program manager from the 

various program areas.  Program officials approve the requests for systems 

changes and provide them to IT personnel for further review.  IT personnel 

then discuss how proposed systems changes will be implemented.  A policy 

steering committee, consisting of managers from FEMA headquarters, defines 

the business processes that are echoed in the technical systems requirements.   

Further, the EP&R CIO has proposed updating NEMIS requirements to 

support the proposed eNEMIS initiative.  In commenting on this report, the 

EP&R CIO discussed plans to elicit broad stakeholder participation in the 

requirements definition process for the e NEMIS initiative. Broad stakeholder 

participation in the requirements definition process will be essential to deliver 

a web based NEMIS to meet varied user needs. 

Emergency Preparedness and Response Could Better Integrate Information Technology  

with Incident Response and Recovery 

Page 30