Starting Thursday October 25, 2012, I have received a number of emergency alerts from a variety of players ? in some cases more than one from some of the players:
1. My employer informing me that they are tracking the storm and of office closures on Monday;
2. ONE of my banks suspending overdraft fees and ATM fees for cash transactions;
3. My utility company promising to do their best to restore lost power;
4. My cable/Internet company promising to do their best to restore lost service;
5. My town informing me of the local expectations of and from the storm and to take precautionary measures;
6. the town where my Mother lives informing me what actions they were taking to prepare for the storm (these messages started on Thursday October 25, 2012 ? the earliest I received) and to take precautionary measures;
7. The town where Gartner?s headquarters is located informing me what actions they were taking to prepare for the storm and to take precautionary measures ;
8. The State of Connecticut informing me of the impending storm and to take precautionary measures;
9. NotifyNYC because I used to live there, I now live close enough to the city to still care, I have family there and also because monitor what?s going on there because of the financial services industry concentration;
10. NYC OEM ? ditto;
11. MEMA ? the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency ? I live between two major US cities ? NYC and Boston; and
12. I was also in Vermont over the weekend and due to an application I have on my smartphone, I received weather-related messages all along the I-91 corridor from mid-CT to lower VT.
Some of the alerts were more effective than others ? mainly for phone messages.
PLUS: The best phone messages were those that had a recording from someone from the player ? I recognized their voice, or at least their name.
PLUS: I really liked being able to confirm receipt of both email and SMS messages. This is REALLY important if you don?t want to continue repeatedly getting the same message because the sender has escalation procedures built into their procedures to continue contacting you until a confirmation is received from any endpoint.
MINUS: The worst phone messages were those were I wasn?t home to accept the call and the message told me to call ANOTHER number and enter a code to either acknowledge the message that was left, or to pick up the message.
MINUS: Test-to-speech wasn?t as good as it could be ? a few of those alerts converted ?CT? (Connecticut) to ?Court?. Not critical when you KNOW the context but when you don?t and if it was an instruction, you could cause a crisis just for the translation problem. Some of that problem can be attributed to the message payload: instead of using ?CT? it should have been spelled out ?CONNECTICUT? ? experience will correct those problems very quickly.
I know that I will continue to receive alerts for the next few days if not through the week. I will be blogging about them through this week.
What I want to know from you is your experience of the alerts you received: the good, the bad and the really ugly. For example, a colleague of mine lives in Zone A in Manhattan and the building management of the apartment in which they live sent out phone and email messages about mandatory evacuation ? the phone message came through 3 1/2 hours AFTER the deadline of the evacuation demand from NYC. See what I mean by the REALLY UGLY.
So ? start sending us your experiences! My colleagues and I will gather them and publish as a lessons learned note from Hurricane Sandy.
BE PREPARED AND BE SAFE!
Category: Advisory BCM Process Event Technology ? ? Tags: Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Planning, COOP, Crisis Management, Emergency Management, Emergency Notification, EMNS, ENS, Hurricane Sandy, Incident Management, Mass Notification
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