Voices from the Sky: The Technology Is the Easy Part

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Opinion

Voices from the Sky: The Technology Is the Easy Part

5/3/2007

By Terry Calhoun

So, you go out and purchase a communications system that will alert tens of thousands of people simultaneously in a crisis situation using ... text messages ... e-mail ... loudspeaker systems ... whatever. Finding a technology that will do the job, even purchasing and installing the software and hardware is the easy part. Some institutions are finding that they may already have a fairly practical solution in place, one that they did not know they owned.

More about that later.

Gearing up for the 'Unthinkable'
On a number of e-mail discussion lists, I have read criticism of companies that provide such systems for their marketing of them in the week following the Virginia Tech shootings. I do not personally feel any negativity about companies who were quick off the mark to promote these kinds of services because I am as aware as anyone that one of the "hard parts" is finding the will, establishing the policy, and getting the budget required to purchase something you might never need.

Memories fade quickly in the aftermath of crises such as these. We thought that the multiple damage to higher education institutions that occurred during 9/11 would cause a surge in planning for coping with disasters, where earlier events such as the Northridge Earthquake, floods and various tornadoes and hurricanes, had failed to cause much of a stir on unaffected campuses. However, by 2005 FEMA had essentially killed the Disaster Resistant Universities program, and folks on campus had other things to worry about.

Then we thought that the difficulties experienced during Katrina would keep the institutional eye focused on the need for emergency and crisis planning. We now had a second example of what could happen to many institutions at once. Since then, a great many IT staff on campuses have been outspoken about the need for such things, and EDUCAUSE is continuing a business continuity project that is of great value.

Sadly, although there has been more attention paid than ever before, being ready for the "unthinkable" is not something that seems to have penetrated many campuses in a systematic way. So, of course people who have related products to sell want to put them before potential customers while there is still attention being paid to the topic. And those who have done it in an inappropriate way will no doubt find out from those potential customers just how inappropriate they thought it was.

I have to wonder how many of those companies have plans in place for how they should appropriately market their products and services in the aftermath of the next disaster to hit several campuses, or the next crisis to hit one large campus in a way that calls for rapid and comprehensive constituency-wide communications....