Are you NIMS-compliant or NIMS-competent?

This is, IMHO, the direct result of mandating NIMS and ICS training (i.e. "excessive" federal linkage of grant funding with training mandates) for positions within agencies that have little to no emergency response role. In other words, we have distracted a great deal of people who will not likely "respond" in online training just because they work for an agency/group that receives federal preparedness funding. Sure, they are compliant, I guess. But are they competent? Probably not. Here's a snippet of a good article on this topic:


The good news now: Many, if not most, of our agencies are now NIMS-compliant. The bad news: Many of us have the illusion that we are also NIMS-competent. But those who actually manage incidents on the street have, in many jurisdictions, observed that in practice, little has changed. Practitioners have either refused to change the way they've done business for years, or they've continued the same old practices with a different vocabulary. Our colleagues in the fire service continue to be the most proficient users of the Incident Command System, because they use it more than EMS or law enforcement agencies.

http://www.emsresponder.com/publication/article.jsp?pubId=1&id=7052