When Disaster Strikes: Next Generation Crisis Communications
by Stephanie Jordan
For me, the word "crisis" immediately brings to mind swirling images of tornados, flooding and general chaos. While these crisis instances are not incorrect, there is a host of other, less dramatic examples. According to Jason Valdina, product manager for Send Word Now, a crisis is any emergency situation where business continuity can be disrupted. This includes anything from a power outage to catastrophic weather to acts of terrorism to the more benign staff absenteeism, technology infrastructure outages or office closures. For organizations to not be negatively impacted by such incidents, good planning is required.
While a good plan can take many forms, at the heart of any solid plan is the ability to communicate with one another. Steve Lewis, Teneros CEO agrees: "If only one question could be asked regarding crisis planning, the one question should be, how are you going to communicate in a crisis? Organizations can lose a lot during a crisis, but you have to be able to talk to each other. If the decision makers and policy formulators needed to keep the business running cannot communicate, then you're finished. The real premium is on when things go horribly wrong, how are we going to connect with each other? Today, as we have found out, it is by and large through email. There is a telephony component, but frankly it pales in comparison to the rich media email, because passing data back and forth is often needed."
Communications-Enabled Business Processes
If the ability to communicate is at the root of successful crisis planning, then it goes to reason that planning should begin there. In September Henry Dewing, principal analyst with Forrester Research published a paper on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Dewing contents that people are more successful when connected to the processes and applications on which their businesses operate. CEBP is a means to bridge business activities and people, with the end result of increased operating efficiency. The term is not necessarily new. "For those in the communications world CEBP is very well known," says Dewing. "I first heard the term with regards to Avaya, but it is catching on elsewhere." Send Word Now, a provider of on-demand alerting and response services to drive communication during time sensitive situations, was cited in the paper as an example of a vendor using the principles of CEBP.
"The big thing with CEPB is it uses Unified Communications underpinnings to find the right person, at the right time, for the business task that is currently being undertaken," explains Dewing. "It is all about real-time communication, and getting the answer you need to finish your job." Most use cases for CEBP are about process improvement. "The key is that you have to know what needs to be done," points out Dewing. "These things are only as good as the processes that are behind them. You can pretty much improve anything. Especially with most things being automated into a system, so that it can happen much faster. At some point though, you have to include human intervention. There is always a communication aspect to it."
Dewing notes that emergency preparedness is one that comes up a lot lately. He notes that a key to successful communications planning is that it has to be well defined. And it must have a robust emergency committee or team. "This is where Send Word Now is good, because you can send word back saying 'I received your message.' It can go something like this: If there is a flood warning in a company. The company can send word to their employees asking: 'Are you in the building and in the process of evacuating? Press 1. If you have received this message, but are not in the building, press 2. If you have gotten this message and are in the building, but you cannot evacuate, press 3', and so on. For people who press 2, they are done. For people who press 1, a follow-on message can be sent asking: 'Are you out of the building now?' And for people who press 3, emergency help can be dispatched. The critical piece is that the communications needs to be closed loop. The process is not done until you have come full circle."
Next Generation Crisis Communications
According to Valdina, the art to CEBP is finding the right thing to enable. "It is overkill to enable everything in this fashion—there are many instances where it could be employed. For example, Walmart uses Send Word Now in cases of high winds to notify employees to go gather shopping carts, so they do not dent cars thereby avoiding insurance implications." Valdina also cites examples like the fires in Southern California and tornado warnings, among other uses. "The big thing that many organizations are just starting to realize is the huge value and efficiencies that they can gain from tightly integrating what a plan says to do, who should do it and tethering that to those peoples contact information and their roles and being able to create a closed loop communication around that tether. Who should be contacted, how should they be contacted and how should they be expected to respond? Creating that bridge is actually a great challenge."
The use of CEBP principles is helping to narrow down complicated crisis planning. "You have the consultants / business analysts that say you have to get your continuity plan in place. Then you have the tech guys that say you have to get your disaster recovery plan together because it is old and needs updating. There are all these binders on the shelf, but in reality if something happens, often they are not in the office or no one is running to the binders," observes Valdina.
In the recent past, crisis communication mostly happened in a single direction, and more often than not those binders with elaborate steps reflect that way of thinking. "Individuals are going to forget all the things they were told about the plan," says Lewis. "The plan may say, during a crisis do the following 50 things. The key to success is to keep it simple. Make it automatic at every level of the plan, whatever it takes to just make it work, and really minimize the set of requirements that says you must behave in a different way during a crisis—for instance the use of different urls, or passwords, or logins. It has to be as seamless as possible." Lewis says no crisis has all the textures of the way you plan for it. He offers an example of a customer in Manhattan during 9/11. "When both power lines in lower Manhattan went down, the plan was to fly tapes out to an alternative disaster recovery location. No one had envisioned that the airplanes would be grounded and would remain grounded for several days. But the good news was they could still talk during that crisis and were able to communicate quickly and collaboratively to determine what to do. In the end they put someone in a car and drove to the site instead. So the company was back up after the 10 to 12 hours it took to get the tapes delivered. While their original plan was flawed, they were still able to talk to each other and work out the wrinkles."
As technology matures, so too does our ability to communicate. "Mobile devices are enabling the process to become much more dynamic. When you look at mobile in the paradym of CEBP, the more we pile on the technologies, or modalities (email, BlackBerry PIN, SMS, etc) the more we increase the chance of getting through to that person, especially in a crisis situation," says Valdina. These multiple ways or modes that people can communicate in return is key to the next generation of crisis communications. "The challenge is that SMS and BlackBerry are very personal and are often paid for by the individual and not the company," notes Valdina. This has made it tough to centralize the information. CEBP is shining a light on this and trying to answer the question: 'How do we obtain the most up-to date information on all the people we need to communicate with?' For example, we work with a lot of universities. What we are hearing is they only have a MySpace address for many of the students. We know that these students have cell phones, but we do not have access to the numbers. The technology is there, but when you get into public and private sector, the question becomes, how do you aggregate as many modalities of communication as possible?"
Planning Considerations
Lewis notes that at the enterprise level, entire staffs are dedicated to planning for crisis situations. For larger organizations in the small to mid-sized business (SMB) range, Lewis says it is being looked at, but more from the vantage of IT and not the collective management for the firm. "This is particularly true of financial services and legal verticals. Our customers are very well informed and spending quite a bit of time on the planning side in the event of a crisis. But as you move down to the smaller SMB, while still addressed, it is not on the same scale, because it takes a lot of time and money."
Even though many companies do have staff dedicated to crisis planning, many do not have the emphasis on communications nor employ the principles of CEBP. "Those organizations that can figure out a way to create a bridge between the best practice, and the people that should take the action; plus provide a streamline way to push that information out and bring information back, will become an example of an "enabled" service, as defined in CEBP," says Valdina
.Whether for a natural disaster or a man made one, Lewis points out that regardless of your organization size being prepared is critical. "For anyone, large enterprise or professional services business, losing half a day is not just inconvenient, it has major revenue impacts," warns Lewis. "And these things happen all the time. Not doing the crisis planning is literally putting your business in jeopardy. The ecosystems that our businesses live in require that we are able to communicate with that ecosystem in real time and the decay-curve issue of not being able to communicate with customers, suppliers, employees is such that if it keeps up for too long (and too long is measured in handful of days, not weeks and months) than literally, your business is in jeopardy. So you better think this stuff through because it can in fact cost you your business if you don't." SJ/TMP