It’s easy just to think of disaster recovery as just a matter of rebuilding systems and data after a catastrophe. I’ll admit, that’s pretty much all I considered until about half an hour ago until I stumbled on this article on Emergency Notification Systems in the Disaster Recovery Journal.
Reading the article requires registering with the site. It’s free, but I can’t honestly say that it’s worth the effort. The article in itself isn’t that impressive. It talks about how businesses can prepare for the possibility of an avian flu pandemic, a topic that when compared to hurricanes, terrorist attacks and congestic traffic patterns may seem somewhat out of date since avian flu has not been dangerous enough to make the headlines much as of late. But the article’s focus on communication as part of the disaster coping process really gave me the framework to make sense of alot of other thoughts I’ve had about disaster recovery in the wake of the Atlanta tornado, hurricanes, wild fires, earthquakes and other such crisis situations.
Those of you from other parts of the country may not know, but a few months ago a tornado came through the heart of downtown Atlanta leaving in it’s wake a trail of selective destruction. Some buildings were hit hard, while neighboring buildings often remained untouched. Luckily there were no fatalities and the twister was quite a way from Engage’s headquarters, so we didn’t suffer personally. But in the weeks after the storm I followed the news and read online to see how the Atlanta community would respond to this tragedy.
What I saw was often the problems a lot businesses have in getting back on their feet weren’t the ones that you’d expect–lost data, trashed buildings, etc. – but more subtle issues having to do with lapses in communication. Clients and employees lacked critical information about how safe or unsafe downtown was, and that impacted their decisions to come into the office, costing businesses productivity.
A sttory on Law.com about how Atlanta law firms dealt with the tragedy offered this interesting tidbit.
Across the street, at Centennial Tower, the tornado broke windows in the exterior building skin but did not penetrate past the second, interior layer, said Randall M. Kessler of the family law firm Kessler, Schwarz & Solomiany, which is on the building’s 35th floor.
“It looks worse than it is,” he said. “The hardest thing has been the fear factor for clients. A lot of people have canceled and rescheduled.”
Kessler worked from home the Monday after the tornado, but said that some of his employees who tried to get to work were thwarted by the traffic and the widespread street closures. He said a paralegal who commutes an hour from Flowery Branch spent three hours getting to work — only to give up half a block from the building because the streets were closed off and she could not find anywhere to park.
All of the issues that Kessler described could have been avoided with communication. Getting emails out to their clients saying that the firm was still open for business and that there was no reason to be afraid might have prevented some appointment cancellations. Providing employees with information about traffic and parking might have helped avoid a failed commute like the one that unlucky paralegal suffered from. Putting the power of a centralized directory for all data and communication services into the hands of their individual staff members and customers would have facilitated better decision making in a more timely manner.
There are lots of way that information like this can be passed along. The old standards like phone and email can obviously play a big part, but new technologies, especially Unified Communications applications offer even more promise. Presence based messaging, for example, would do an excellent job of reaching employees and providing them with important information in the wake of a disaster like the Atlanta Tornado.
Emory University has been experimenting with a text message based Emergency Notification System. The results have been promising, but the trial and error process has shown just how important it is to thoroughly test any system like this. In early trials a lot of messages never made it through because they were marked as spam. Emory had to go back and talk to wireless carriers about getting white-listed so that the messages wouldn’t be blocked in the future.
The lesson of all of this is that any disaster recovery plan has to take into account the inevitable communication disruption that will come with a catastrophe. Businesses need to figure out how to use technology to deal with that disruption, and then thoroughly test their solutions so that come the day after d-day employees aren’t cruising the streets for hours, looking for a place to park.
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