Denver quickly transformed its Emergency Operations Center to be virtual, using digital forms created with Nintex.
On Friday, March 13, 2020, Denver’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) faced an emergency—of its own.
City officials sent workers home knowing that most of them, including those on the EOC, wouldn’t be coming back on Monday, as part of the government’s stay-at-home response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The City and County employs more than 11,000 people across 50+ business units, and its EOC is made up of 100 total members with representatives from across the city.
The emergency: How to keep most of an EOC’s shift of 100 members working to ensure public safety when every tool and process they relied on was physically in a 1,000 sq. ft. facility to which they would no longer have access. With the help of the right technology, Denver’s Technology Services department succeeded.
Digitize, communicate, and collaborate
Denver’s Technology Services department set up a Microsoft Teams site to serve as an online EOC in which workers could communicate and collaborate. It was a great start, but there were still workflows that were dependent on moving some 50 pencil-and-paper forms from desk to desk in processes that could each take up to seven steps. The team wanted more customization than it could get from InfoPath, and just using SharePoint as a repository for Word docs was likely to result in the templates getting inadvertently overwritten.
Fortunately, Denver’s Technology Services department had experience with Nintex and knew it could provide the solution they were searching for. Over the weekend, they digitized 20 forms using Nintex Forms, and quickly brought that number up to 65 over the three-month activation.
The swift activation of the virtual EOC has not only allowed Denver employees to be productive, but it also keeps them safe as they don’t need to report to a physical office to respond to an emergency. With Microsoft Teams and Nintex Forms they can be effective and even more productive from the safety of their homes.
