Project ERMA organised two workshops during the course of the project. The first one was scheduled in February 2007, the second one as final event workshop at the end of the project.

The latter one was also to establish a user community for dissemination, exchanging, and discussing the ideas of ERMA and being in contact with experts and potential customers after the end of the project.

Background: IT Solutions for risk management

Over the last two decades, the rise of information technologies has affected virtually all segments of society, and successfully met with that of risk management, warning systems and decision support for emergency situations. This could be witnessed in the development of risk-related projects funded under the EC’s research framework (FP) and its IT-dedicated programme IST.

In particular, FP6 and FP7 have been opportunities for IT specialists and risk management (RM) experts to explore IT-based solutions for risk management services. Among these solution, Software Oriented Architectures (SOA) has demonstrated a capability to host several risk-related applications, based on function-specific modules. As part of the above mentioned EC-funded initiatives, the ERMA project (2006-2008) lead to the successful development of a SOA platform addressing small and medium scale User Group requirements for risk and emergency management.

ERMA: An opportunity for sharing good practices

While developing this system, ERMA consortium members could benefit from a wealth of resources – data, information, hard/software solutions, good practices – already existing in the field of IT-based applications for RM purposes.

ERMA partners could also witness similarities in frequently asked questions (FAQs) and difficulties users were confronted with when relying on IT applications for RM purposes. This includes: availability of and access to data; privacy issues; reliability of telecom networks and other utilities; liability issues change management issues in client organisations. Last but not least, similarities in problem-solving approaches, and solutions, could also be identified.

These are the considerations that have lead ERMA consortium members to recognise the need for support to be provided to IT users engaged in risk and emergency decisions, tasks or activities.

The ERMA User Group aims at addressing this need.

ERMA User group: a definition

Acronym: ERMA stands for Electronic Risk Management Architecture

Activity description:

ERMA User group: format and contents

The ERMA User Group is supported by a web-based platform for exchange of information and good practice.

Participants of the User Group will access:

Information

Services

Additional services likely to be provided by the ERMA User Group include: expert review of technical documents or papers, labelling of IT/RM projects etc. Such services may however require payment of fees.

Governance of the ERMA user group

Governance of the ERMA User Group shall cover the following issues:

 For 2009-2010, the governance of the User Group is open to ERMA consortium members only.

Membership issues

Access to ERMA User Group is basically free of charge, although payment of fee may be requested, depending on the type of service received.

If you are interested joining this user group, just subscribe to the the Newsletter (at homepage) and we will call you back by email to detail your subscription!

Your ERMA team