Fire Risk Management

FIRE RISK
MANAGEMENT

Identification of the issues
 The first problem was that volunteers of CFA did not share knowledge about fire
fighting among themselves. The 56000 volunteers CFA employed belonged to
different cultures and came from all over Australia and thus did share
knowledge among themselves owing to the cultural differences amongst
themselves. In fact, the digital knowledge management platform which CFA
used namely, SharePoint did not operate properly.
 The second problem which CFA suffered from was lack of communication
between the staff both horizontally and vertically.
 The third problem actually stemmed from the second problem. The third
problem was that the lack of communication culminated into weak change
management in CFA.
 The fourth problem was that the privacy policy in CFA was so strict that the
staff were not able to use historical data which in turn made secondary research
required to deal with challenging situations difficult.
 The fifth problem which CFA volunteers faced in fact escalated all the
aforementioned issues, the volunteers lack proper technological knowledge and
the senior members aged over 46 years were hostile to social media.

Suggested tools (step 2)
(Reccomendations)
 Tool 1 or solution 1: Organisation wide communication system: The
organisation wide communication system would aim at building up a strong
communication between the 56000 volunteers of CFA. As mentioned in the case
study that the first problem CFA faced knowledge sharing problem. This was because
the volunteers belonged to different cultural groups and thus did not communicate
with each other. This inhibited flow of the acquired knowledge in between the
volunteers and pieces of important information eventually lost their values. The
second issue mentioned in the case study was poor communication between the
personnel working at the headquarters levels. The tool of communication system
would enable CFA to counteract these two issues right at the grass root level. The
communication system would enable establishment of communication channels
which would enable employee communicate important information using different
media right from emails to teleconferencing to face to face meeting. The use of
diversity management and cultural management training would enhance the cultural
intelligence among the volunteers. This would enable CFA to establish a stronger
communication channel between the volunteers by transcending cultural differences.