When disasters strike, one of two things regularly happen: The affected organization either isn’t prepared, or fails to follow its crisis plan. To avoid the latter, your critical event management system must be equipped to also handle the next crisis – not just the previous one.
«We were prepared for a pandemic, just not this pandemic», said the Norwegian prime minister recently in defense of her government’s handling of the pandemic – and was promptly met with ridicule from both press and opposition alike.
Also, in the early days of the pandemic, the municipality of Oslo quickly discovered that their primary support system for critical event management (commonly called a CEM) was incapable of assisting them in handling the complex challenges facing the city. The system was originally built for smaller municipalities, and hadn’t evolved much over the years.
In light of this, it is tempting to quote the famous heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, «everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth». In other words: Your plans are worthless if they fail you when the need arises.
Crisis communication
There are two forms of communication that are vital in a crisis: The first is what the organisation communicates to employees and the outside world. The second – somewhat less discussed – is all about how the company maintains the ability to communicate internally and with its central stakeholders.
Because many solutions have focused primarily on the first form of communication, many critical event management systems in current use are capable of sending out text messages alerting employees when something happens. Far fewer can tackle a response from the employees. Have they received the message? Are they in need of help? And do they have relevant information to offer? If so, the organisation must be able to effectively disseminate it.
If you have no way of communicating with your key employees when a crisis strikes, you may quickly find yourself without much to relay to the outside world, and that can be even worse. Most modern organisations say their people are their most valuable asset, and a crisis is the ultimate test for that: Do you have the right capabilities in place to to mobilise and ensure their well-being in an emergency situation, irrespective of their location?
What if...
Suppose a flash flood, gas leak or forest fire threatens a particular region or neighborhood. Can you reliably reach out to warn your employees – who were dispatched on a service assignment to that general vicinity two hours ago – about the situation, and quickly find out if they’re safe?
If there’s suddenly a fire in Paris, a riot in Washington or a bombing in London, can you quickly ascertain whether any of your employees – even if they’re on holiday – are close to where the danger is, and contact them quickly if that is the case?
Or let’s say a suspicious parcel is found in the lobby of your main office. Do you have the systems in place to efficiently evacuate all employees and tenants, and reliably alert relevant authorities in seconds or minutes? How about if your organisation is hit by a cyber attack? Can you quickly (and not via e-mail) reach all your employees to tell them to under no circumstance open that e-mail sent from their colleague?
And if any of these things happen by night, can you override the «silence» function on cell phones in order to wake up key personnel? And can your system automatically gather all critical personnel in a Teams-meeting in less than a minute?
These are just some examples of critical functionality in a modern Critical Emergency Management system, and if your current system is not equipped for this, you may still be able to handle a crisis – just not the ones your organisation is likely to face in the future.
Keep the connection
In the realm of defense and warfare, many nations have belatedly discovered that they have been preparing their armies and societies to fight the previous war – instead of the next one (France’s Maginot Line being but one case in point). It is of course far smarter to study what new technologies have emerged that are likely to determine the outcome of the next wars, and then bring those into the equation.
The variety of devices currently in use in modern corporations means that photos, audio, video and a plethora of data points are continually being gathered in the field. All of this must be intelligently shared with relevant parts of the organization to expand the ability to make data-based, informed decisions.
As if that wasn’t enough, markets change (online shopping in Norway is up 58 percent), work habits evolve (if in 2019 your 200 employees were spread over 2-3 locations, your staff may now be spread over 200-300 «offices»), and new threats develop (ransomware attacks grew by 485 percent in 2020, by some estimates).
All of these changes have created new openings for malfeasance, and it is simply not feasible to stay on top of all threat vectors if your crisis management system isn’t up-to-date.
Four productive forces
We would like to challenge you to benchmark it against BlackBerry Alert. Commissioned by U.S. authorities in the aftermath of 9/11, it was originally built from the ground up to provide the various agencies everything they learnt that they could have needed to handle that crisis better. In the decades since, it has been tested, expanded and improved through everyday use in a plethora of government agencies, emergency response teams, health organisations and corporations all across the world.
BlackBerry Alert is now the authoritative system to help organizations Prepare, Respond, Recover and Improve, not just in times of crisis. The capabilities of this system makes it a useful tool also in the everyday runnings of many companies – possibly also yours.
The system Prepares an organisation for an event by designing communication templates and response workflows for every high-priority risk scenario. These workflows can also include procedures for collecting real-time time data from internal and external warning systems when a critical event may be underway.
It also enables organisations to Respond more effectively by sending messages to employees and stakeholders through multiple communications channels. This helps ensure messages are received even if a primary channel becomes unavailable or an employee loses access to a particular device.
In order for your organisation to Recover rapidly, it provides incident managers with a consolidated, real-time view of response activity and the status of team adherence to the response playbook. The system thereby helps Improve an organisation’s plans and processes, as well as facilitating audits, by reviewing detailed response logs and automatically generated reports.
Now you can communicate
In short, BlackBerry Alert is the world standard in critical event management, and we encourage you to reach out to discuss benchmarking it against your current solution. It is reasonably priced, surprisingly easy to deploy, and forged through continuous use by some of the world’s most seasoned and experienced emergency response teams over decades.
With that kind of a critical event management system in place, crisis communication becomes if not easy, then at least easier. Facts can replace speculation, a holistic view can supplant random anecdotes, and informed, decisive actions can oust hesitation or fumbling.
In other words, when the next crisis punches you in the mouth, you’ll be able to fight back. Your organisation will not only appear more competent, prepared and professional, you will be all of those things. And that will also be felt by every one of those aforementioned most valuable assets of the organisation – your employees.
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