Veoci CORE, a set of solutions meant to cover all the possibilities in the EOC, is one of Veoci’s oldest offerings for governments and municipalities. Our team’s first concepts for CORE came about in 2019, and that set of solutions under the CORE banner has transformed to meet our customers’ evolving needs.
With CORE well-established, Veoci’s Government team has been looking for new ways to innovate, and are excited to get new and much-needed products out to our customers in government, emergency management, and other areas of focus.
CORE Origins
Mark Demski, NRP, CEM, joined the Veoci team in 2017, and with him came the full knowledge of an experienced emergency manager. Mark himself had served in the role for almost 3 decades, from small local EOCs to the state agency level. We put together a profile on Mark a few years back, where we covered a lot of his experience.
Mark saw the operational landscape shift alongside technology during those 3 decades, and took careful note of how technology integrated into the EOC. He saw what worked, what didn’t, and how technology would continue to grow as a partner in the EOC.
When Mark joined Veoci, he saw how the platform bridged current gaps and its role would only continue to grow. His only challenge was getting Veoci, a platform that could do it all, out to smaller municipalities lacking the bucks needed for a modern software solution.
That limited budget of many smaller entities forced him to be creative. He needed a shortlist, so he reflected on his own experiences in the EOC and singled out a few of the solutions. Mark also polled other practitioners on the Veoci team, drawing from both their field experiences and expertise as Solutions Engineers. Finally, Mark also asked Veoci customers which of their solutions were most critical to them, their EOCs, and their operations.
The list of a dozen solutions quickly came together, and each solution was built to be easily replicated and offer an essential level of customization. The ability to build on a solid foundation was an aspect he knew CORE would need.
What Mark saw coming was a new generation of emergency managers, a group willing and able to shake things up. Veoci CORE came together and gave this younger cohort (and the established practitioners) a way to bring new technology into the EOC, replace old pen and paper processes, legacy HTML-based technology and keep the EOC flexible enough to handle the inevitable riptides of emergency planning and response.
What sometimes feels to Mark like a basic offering has been a boon for Veoci customers. Veoci CORE not only meets their expectations, it gives some emergency managers additional runway. They can not only get the necessary planning, response, and recovery pieces done, but find the time, resources, and pathways to do even more.
Today, Veoci CORE offers our government customers a means of integrating multiple solutions together: situational awareness, damage assessments, resource requesting, mission tasking, after-action reporting, IAP and ICS forms, real-time mapping, daily operations, emergency management, EOC management, and more. CORE makes the solutions interoperable and always accessible.
But the group listed above won’t remain static. Mark, Chip Orton, and the rest of the Veoci Government Team plan to keep CORE a modern product that anticipates the needs of its users.
What’s Next?
So, what’s next for the Veoci Government Team?
Chip Orton III, MBA, CPM, CEM, TEM, joined Veoci at the end of 2022 as our Product Manager for Emergency Management with a vision. He knew we could do more than CORE, so he started on making that a reality.
Much like Mark, Chip is a well-practiced, knowledgeable, and established emergency manager.
Chip’s experience spans public health, healthcare, and government writing plans, building programs, and taking on any preparedness task asked of him.
Chip is also an IT and digital native. Regardless of the task on hand, he leveraged technology and found its best uses in the setting, even shouldering programming responsibilities where needed.
Like so many of the people on the Veoci team, he has an incredible sense for what our customers need in both their activated EOCs and daily operations from his field experience. Combined with his tech savvy, he’s the right person to continue building the solutions and products we can serve to our government customers.
A lot is in the works, but the most recent venture for the group is Veoci AIM Gov, a product built for an operation that persists through blue skies and emergency scenarios: asset and inventory management.
Veoci AIM Gov is meant to make a large, always-moving operation stuffed with data more manageable. State and local agencies encounter a wide range of scenarios, but asset and inventory management is a constant through that spectrum. Such an important and ubiquitous operation needs to be streamlined and complex while being simple on the surface. Anyone, regardless of their familiarity with the process, can use the solution and create clean, reliable data.
A single point of entry for data forms a strict funnel for all requests, and aggregate reports give managers and administrators a clear sightline into the turnover of assets and inventory. Its simplicity ensures that the solution is not only user-friendly and accessible to any stakeholder, but that it also doesn’t become cumbersome in the course of daily operations or an activation.
An important principle Chip and Veoci’s Government team operate by is flexibility. Sure, CORE and AIM Gov have strict definitions right now, but they will change as time passes.
World events, regulations, technological developments, industry shifts, trends, and anticipation for everything we just mentioned will force some change onto CORE and AIM Gov, adjustments that will follow the changing landscape our customers operate in.
CORE and the newly minted AIM Gov are just two of a group our government team envisions growing. Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) exercise builder and documentation generation, family reunification, fire operations, public health, community lifelines, and Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) / Tier II hazardous materials are all currently under the microscope.
Government operations support many essential functions and infrastructure people use every day, and this weight is felt at every level, even at small municipalities. While CORE is intended for emergency management and daily operations, we know this wide pool of responsibilities is full of opportunities, ones our team of emergency managers can flip into net benefits for municipalities, towns, counties, and state agencies.
