Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department

At LISA2005 Brent Chapman gave an excellent talk "Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department". (Slides are webified here or download the PDF).

The ICS methodology has a lot of really good points to it. Adopting it for IT work should have a lot of benefits, not just in emergencies:

If you use it for "routine" and pre-planned events like moves, upgrades, and deployments, your team will be more comfortable using it for "surprise" events like outages and security incidents.

Brent has more about LISA2005 in his blog entry.