Improving organisational resilience: the TURNkey project

Abstract

Facilities managers have a key role to play in improving organisational resilience to disaster events. However, there is currently limited support available to help them understand and systematically manage related issues. At the strategic level, they need to understand the physical, operational, and organisational risks associated with individual and cascading events. At the operational level, they need to develop mitigation interventions to reduce and manage these risks. This paper discusses results from the TURNkey project, which developed a forecasting, early warning and consequence response platform to assist decision-makers prepare for, respond to and recover from a potential earthquake event. It looks at this disaster management platform through the lens of business, outlining the opportunities and challenges facilities managers face when using it to manage organisational resilience. First, the paper presents an overview of the TURNkey platform and describes a series of end-user use cases that were developed to identify the key business issues the platform needed to address. The paper then reports the results of a hypothetical case study undertaken as part of a regional earthquake simulation to show how the outputs from the TURNkey FWCR platform can be integrated into existing resilience plans. The paper concludes by highlighting outstanding integration issues and the role that facilities managers can play in helping resolve them. Although the paper draws on evidence from earthquake disasters, its findings and conclusions are generic, and applicable to any disaster event.