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Katrina Teaches Red Cross The Value Of Collaboration

Yet Cooper's mettle wasn't truly tested till Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast a year ago, only months after he left Homeland Security to become CIO at the American Red Cross.

Katrina was a humbling experience for Cooper and the Red Cross. For instance, the relief agency would arrive at a disaster site, and its employees and volunteers would immediately take charge. That didn't set well with some locals. Cooper cites a large Gulf Coast Vietnamese fishing community in which the take-charge approach failed, in part because the Red Cross staffers didn't understand the victims' language and culture, which includes an ethos of self-reliance. "We had well-intentioned people, but bossed people around," Cooper says. "That's not the way we want to behave. We took it on the chin." Now the Red Cross asks community leaders how it can assist by providing money and supplies. "We changed our model," he says.

One model the Red Cross changed is how to more closely collaborate with the industry to develop systems that can scale to support the most unfathomable catastrophes.

That understanding on how to collaborate began to crystallize last Aug. 29, a Monday, as Katrina struck New Orleans. American Red Cross leaders realized they didn't have the resources ready to handle a disaster of that magnitude, including provisioning an unknown number of people and determining where they'd be sheltered. A typical hurricane is localized, with communications failures within a relatively small geographic area. Eventually, Katrina wreaked havoc on 90,000 square miles of the Southeast, an area nearly the size of Great Britain.

As Cooper grasped the fact that the relief group didn't have the IT wherewithal to meet the challenge alone, he figuratively reached for his large Rolodex, fattened with business cards from IT executives he met during his years at Homeland Security. It wasn't unusual to see vendors queued up at an IT industry function to pitch products at Cooper. He used those industry contacts within 48 hours of Katrina making landfall, and late afternoon that Wednesday phoned nearly two dozen top vendor executives requesting they send their "best and brightest" to a meeting to map out an IT response plan the next afternoon in Washington.

Not a single executive turned Cooper down. Seventy-five IT experts converged on the Red Cross' Board of Governors Hall at 3 p.m. Thursday, and within three hours split into teams to address five crucial IT challenges involving shelters, emergency assistance services, linking families, infrastructure, and network access. As the dinner hour arrived, the IT experts relocated to the cafeteria to continue working till midnight and resumed their planning session at 7:30 the next morning. By 3 p.m. Friday, Sept. 2, the IT master plan was in place, and the IT executives either returned to their companies to execute the plan, or in some situations headed for the Gulf Coast to implement the solutions on the ground.

Cooper wasn't shy about accepting hardware, software, and services from the vendors. He asked for donations, but if the company wanted to be paid, he told them to send him the bill, and he'd pay when matters quieted.

"If I had done a similar type of thing at DHS, I'd still be sitting in jail," Cooper says.

Government procurement regulations prevented the much-criticized Homeland Security Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency from acquiring goods and services in the way he did at the Red Cross. Cooper says he understands the need for strict governmental procurement regulations, but believes a mechanism should be in place to suspend those rules during a catastrophic disaster.

"In the Red Cross...you get reprimanded by your CEO as 'don't do this again, but congratulations on what you did, and now let's figure out a way so when it happens again we learned from what we did.' "

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