When Hurricane Katrina, the sixth-strongest Atlantic Ocean hurricane ever recorded, slammed into the state of Louisiana in 2005, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tasked his teams with housing evacuees that were a mere five hour drive away. Relative to the population, Arkansas saw the largest influx of residents compared to any other state. State officials were responsible for not only tracking evacuees, but referring them to the correct state department to provide them with appropriate aid.

The State of Arkansas, with a slew of volunteers and city employees, launched Operation KARE (Katrina Assistance and Relief Effort) at the Department of Information Systems (DIS) in order to assist the evacuees en route. To manage the monumental KARE effort on such short notice, the department needed a technology that was both familiar to workers yet flexible enough to be molded for special needs. It turned to FrontRange™ HEAT® Service & Support, its existing IT Service Management application, and used it in an innovative way: to track people and their needs instead of the traditional IT problems. With HEAT, volunteers created profiles of evacuees and their needs based on incoming calls. Depending on the type of call, volunteer agents tapped into the HEAT knowledge base to provide answers, or routed calls to subject matter experts in specific state departments.

Arkansas officials say the ability to customize HEAT for this specific, immediate need was critical to the state’s quick response and ability to prepare before evacuees arrived. From small requests to interstate efforts to reunite families, every resolution proved important to people who had lost everything. Overall, DIS kept the KARE database live for a month, and took thousands of calls. The database continues to provide valuable information, most recently to connect family members with evacuees involved in a car accident.

“We had volunteers who had never seen HEAT sit down and start helping evacuees in a few minutes,” said Nancy Jauernig, Customer Relationship Management Administrator at DIS. “Without an application like this, I don’t know that we could have provided assistance as quickly as we did.”

Within 24 hours, the HEAT database and a single phone number for all KARE issues were activated. With a secondary KARE database created, HEAT helped track thousands of people, their locations and specific needs, in order to provide resources, information or an important re-connection with family members. Call takers were responsible for providing technology services like phone lines, computers and cell phones at more than a dozen statewide camps and retreat centers. It was imperative for DIS to immediately bring a database online and staff a dedicated call center.

“We helped a lot of people. We really came together as a state,” said Jauernig.

About the Arkansas Department of Information Systems (DIS)
DIS provides information technology solutions for the State of Arkansas, from telephony and data networking to technical consulting to the public entities that serve citizens. About 250 DIS professionals support 50,000 state employees – with Arkansas state government being the state’s largest employer – as well as extending technology support to commissions, city and county offices, public schools and higher education throughout Arkansas.