Staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a U.S. federal agency that coordinates disaster response when the President declares a national disaster, always got two floods at once. First, water covered the land. Next, a flood of paper, required to administer the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), covered their desks—pallets and pallets of green-striped reports poured off a mainframe printer and into their offices. Individual reports were sometimes 18 inches thick, with a nugget of information about insurance claims, premiums, or payments buried in them somewhere. Bill Barton and Mike Miles don’t claim to be able to do anything about the weather, but the project manager and computer scientist, respectively, from Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) have used Web FOCUS software from Information Builders to turn back the flood of paper generated by the NFIP. The program allows the government to work together with national insurance companies to collect flood insurance premiums and pay claims for flooding in communities that adopt flood control measures. As a result of CSC’s work, FEMA staff no longer leaf through paper reports to find the data they need. Instead, they browse insurance data posted on NFIP’s Bureau Net intranet site, select just the information they want to see, and get an onscreen report or download the data as a spreadsheet.

Questions for Discussion
1. What is FEMA and what does it do?
2. What are the main challenges that FEMA faces?
3. How did FEMA improve its inefficient reporting practices?