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Continuity of Operations

A two-hundred-page all-hazards plan whose first instruction is to skip the plan and go straight to the appendices.

Also known as COOP, All-Hazards Planning, ICS

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 10 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Wrote the City of Jacksonville technology department’s Continuity of Operations Plan: two hundred pages, all-hazards, aligned to the county’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan and written against Duval County’s identified top hazards — tropical cyclone wind and storm surge, flooding, terrorism, hazardous materials, wildfire at the urban interface, tornado and pandemic health emergency.

Built on Incident Command System doctrine in three phases — initiation, alternate operations, reconstitution and termination — with time-phased implementation, delegation of authority, orders of succession, and devolution of command and control.

Made usable under duress rather than merely complete: mission-critical functions with recovery timelines, separate procedures for each operating group, alternate site strategy with an initiation checklist, drive-away kits, vital records identification, critical equipment and vendor contact lists, damage assessment forms, and evacuation accountability rosters by building and floor. Its first instruction is to skip the plan and go straight to the appendices if you are already in an emergency, because a continuity plan that has to be read cover to cover during a hurricane is not a plan.

A pandemic influenza annex was added in 2009 — eleven years before most organizations discovered they needed one.

The first COOP was written years earlier, for the Florida National Guard at Coleman Technologies.

Applied in

  • Security Posture, Incidents and Federal Liaison2012–2024Working directly with the City's Chief Security Officer on posture, governance, attacks and breaches — and alongside Homeland Security and the FBI when an incident reached that far.
  • Ed Ball Hearing Room — Backup Council Chambers2022–2024A committee room specified to run a City Council meeting if the Chamber were unavailable — which makes it a continuity facility for the legislative body, not a meeting room.
  • JaxReady — Public Emergency Preparedness Platform2012–2024The City's evacuation and flood zone lookup, on mobile and the public web — carried into the emergency public information chain, and tested as critical infrastructure rather than as a website.
  • Enterprise GIS Platform2006–2023Seventeen years of architecture authority over the City's geospatial estate — and the record of it is a capacity and availability record rather than a mapping one.
  • Reliability Engineering Practice2000–2023A reliability toolchain bought for one utility engagement in 2000, carried into a city estate, and still running twenty-three years later — availability as a computed number rather than a drawn assertion.
  • NFL Stadium Cybersecurity Review2022–2023A league Internal Audit assessment of the city-owned stadium against the Department of Homeland Security's stadium cybersecurity guidelines, reaching the building's control systems as much as its enterprise IT.
  • Emergency Operations Center Activations2006–2021Seven activations keeping public-safety and EOC systems available under hurricane conditions — in Logistics from 2006 and as the division's Emergency Coordination Officer from 2008 — with each after-action review fed back into the architecture.
  • Disaster Recovery Validation and Application Tiering2020Criticality bound to recovery objectives in an instrument rather than a narrative, and a definition of "tested" that the estate could not yet meet — reported rather than softened.
  • Republican National Convention — National Special Security EventJune – October 2020Critical Infrastructure Subcommittee for a national special security event relocated to the city eight weeks into planning — first-responder mobility, venue design, carrier redundancy, and federal sensors landed on a municipal estate.
  • ITD Continuity of Operations Plan2007–2016A two-hundred-page all-hazards continuity plan whose first instruction is to skip the plan and go straight to the appendices.
  • Florida National Guard Continuity of Operations Plan2001–2003The first COOP of the career — the discipline carried forward into the City of Jacksonville plan a decade later.

Career

Documents

  • ITD Continuity of Operations Plan2009Two hundred pages, all-hazards, sole author. Aligned to the county emergency management plan and built on Incident Command System doctrine.

Attested by

  • Emergency Management Training2006 · undefinedNine courses taken in 2006, two years before the Emergency Coordination Officer designation they led to — the Incident Command System sequence through ICS-400, two continuity courses, and the Florida state academy.

See also

Also searched as

  • operational resilience
  • BCP
  • BCDR
  • business continuity
  • RTO
  • RPO
  • incident command
  • NIMS
  • ICS
  • crisis management
  • EOC
  • all-hazards

Continuity and recovery filed separately at the time, under the single term the regulated world later settled on.