Groupdolists
Secure and collaborative incident Response

In the event of an unexpected incident at any organization, creating the element of control across the response teams is a priority. Coordinating them and ensuring that employees and assets are secure and safe is an extremely important responsibility, especially amidst the chaos that usually arises when an emergency is at the door. Groupdolists is a technology platform that helps bring order to this confusion, where for any organization— be it a government agency or a private firm—they provide ways for front lines and those tasked with coordinating the response and recovery to coordinate in a simpler, faster and better way. “As a coordination platform, our solution puts users on the same page by giving them a chronological picture of who is doing what, with respect to incident response,” says Michael J. Sher, the president and founder of Groupdolists.

Most organizations have predefined standard and emergency operating procedures in place, most often in the form of Word, PDF, or Excel documents, which are typically not easily accessible and definitely not very actionable. Groupdolists creates a very simple common operating picture to be used in such situations. Subscribers take their procedures, in whatever native format available and digitize them into the Groupdolists format, making them available from a single login portal via the web or mobile device, in an encrypted format. This ensures that when an incident leader needs to access procedures during say, fire, flood, power outage, cyber-attack, severe weather, etc., not only are their digitized procedures in place, but there are also pre-foreseen user-defined tasks that can be used in case of specific situations.

From a user perspective, the leader goes to www.groupdolists.com (or to their iPhone or Android device)—which would be open and logged into, looks up the library of procedures and chooses the most suitable one. Once a procedure is selected and activated, a copy is created and turned into a “Groupdolist,” which the incident leader can then distribute with an invite button to a preset group of response teams. After this, everyone invited receives an in-app notification to accept the invitation. Subsequently, the loop gets closed, and the incident leader gets a popup, which informs him as to who has joined. The volume of typical distractions like texts or voicemails is reduced after accepting the invitation, and the entire procedure with all tasks are pushed down simultaneously to everyone’s devices.

As a coordination platform, our solution instantly mobilizes teams, putting everyone on the same page by providing a chronological picture of who is doing what, with respect to incident response

As tasks are completed, they sync across to the entire team so all participants what’s been completed and what’s still outstanding.

The goal is to reduce the noise and bring everyone onto the same page creating an isolated network, barring all external communications during the incident, helping keep all information within a closed loop and lends the element of complete transparency within the team. Not only does this make the individuals participating more accountable for their actions, but it also drives after-action assessment capabilities in terms of reporting format, which may be exported. Currently, a division within the U.S. Department of the Interior is one amongst several government agencies that employ Groupdolists for response, recovery and team tasking.

Groupdolists was started by the co-founder of Send Word Now as a solution to solve the problem of response team coordination during unexpected situations. Based on market needs, the team is working on different levels of access privileges, two-factor authentication, exportable audit trails and more. Additionally, many government agencies don’t want their data hosted on a third-party server or the cloud. As a result, data is encrypted on Groupdolists’ system at rest, and in-transit, with the company developing a hybrid hosting model, wherein any government agency can retain the data in a secure in-house cloud using hybrid hosting.

The company is purpose driven, streamlining secure response team coordination, ensuring that they are always in a position to make a difference and be responsive to demands in the market.