5-year emergency management technology roadmap

Emergency management at a major US utility is mostly reactive by default — a 5-year roadmap forced the harder question: how do you get ahead of the incident, not just respond to it?

Problem

The utility’s emergency management team needed a coherent technology roadmap — not a one-off pilot — that would carry them through the next five years across simulations, IoT, and spatial computing. The team had real operational capacity and real budget, but no unifying strategy connecting those three capability areas to outcomes that mattered: faster situational awareness, better pre-event planning, and tighter field coordination during incidents.

Approach

Architected the 5-year roadmap around one thesis: simulate the emergency before it happens, sense the environment continuously, and coordinate the response spatially. Sequenced investments so each year’s capability built on the previous — simulation-driven training and planning, IoT sensing for field state, spatial-computing tools for command and field alignment. Framed the roadmap against the team’s operational realities, not just vendor capability, and translated it into executive-ready decks for stakeholders across the utility.

Outcome

• 5-year technology roadmap adopted by SDG&E emergency management team
• Shifted operating posture from reactive to proactive
• Positioned the team for phased investment across simulations, IoT, and spatial computing
• TODO: verify metric — committed investment value under the roadmap
• TODO: verify metric — specific capabilities deployed against year 1