Does Your Emergency Communications System Measure Up?

How to Communicate

Tips for Implementing a Mass Notification Solution

Best Practices:
It is important to have multiple communications modalities available. Do not rely on just text or voice mail. Also, use the systems to account for personnel: When you send an alert message, you can have people respond back with their status or location.

Pain Points:
Homegrown systems are fine for many disciplines, but emergency notification is not one of them. Work with an organization that has a track record of implementations.

Trends:
Mobile apps are maturing and can be used for personnel to initiate alerts by reporting an incident. Reporting in is no less important than getting the word out. Geotracking capability allows the emergency center to track the location of first responders; in an emergency it identifies who is closest and can respond quickly.

Budget Savers:
While it is appropriate to invest in a comprehensive emergency communications infrastructure, it is wise to choose which capabilities should remain on-site and which can be handled by a service provider. Not only can this minimize expenditures, it can also improve efficiency and ease the burden of an IT lacking emergency preparedness expertise.

Once you tie all those systems together, then what? Exactly what is the message you should be transmitting? How should it be worded? For visual messaging, what colors should be used? How should warning tones be differentiated? At what intervals should messages be repeated? Too often could lead to message fatigue or selective deafness. The Quincy, Mass.-based National Fire Protection Association, with its National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code (NFPA 72), has gone a long way in advancing the standards for the implementation of messaging infrastructures (it offers rules for many types of emergency messaging and much more), but observers agree that more needs to be done in terms of message content and operations.

“The NFPA 72 Code is a significant step forward, but it is not fully adopted and that leaves us dealing with the lack of an industry-wide standard,” says Greg Sparrow, director of System Integration at Signet Electronic Systems, a systems integrator based in Norwell, Mass. “Fire alarm codes have been strictly enforced for decades, but, when it comes to usage of digital signage for mass notification (as opposed to advertising), how many monitors there should be, where they go, how the content should be constructed, and even determining remotely whether the devices are actually functioning are open questions.”

For now what you need is a carefully developed emergency plan that details the kinds of messaging, the conditions required for the messaging, the tools used to deliver the messaging, how to best deal with the response to the messaging and the plan for ongoing efforts as the emergency evolves.

Pick the Methodology that Fits

Like other A/V solutions, mass notification can be configured to run on the customer’s own data center servers, protected behind the firewall. For large corporations and universities with vast server capacity and IT expertise, doing so makes sense, both economically and in terms of keeping operations and management in-house.

Yet, that method is not for everyone. For houses of worship or independent hotels with no internal IT infrastructure or staff, implementation of mass notification as a hosted subscription service offers fast deployment and ready access to experts. A hosted service would mean that a vendor would set up a system on their end “in the cloud” and you would manage messaging through it, but integration is limited.

Still, three common models exist: on-site behind the firewall, as a hosted application from a service provider that frees IT from the responsibility and as a hybrid where the customer keeps certain components behind the firewall while also reaching out to a provider for phone lines to help keep their internal phone capacity open. The hybrid method also provides redundancy, allowing the hosting center to act as a backup in extraordinary circumstances, says Joshi.

Like so many other systems, network uptime and reliability is crucial. It’s one thing for a sales report to be delayed due to a bad router, but having the mass notification system go down can lead to dire consequences.

“Some IT departments want the r
esponsibility and will support these systems on their networks. Others do not want to be responsible for the safety of employees, students, and first responders,” says Joshi. As a solution provider and systems integrator, Signet’s Sparrow is in full agreement. “The customer’s network infrastructure is critical. Everything connects through it,” says Signet’s Sparrow. “If you are not comfortable with guaranteeing absolute availability, consider a parallel network or an outside hosted service.”

And that’s just the point. Mass notification solutions are all about comfort levels and therefore demand the highest possible availability. Whether that means a full behind-the-firewall implementation, subscribed to as a hosted service, or something in between is not a matter to be taken lightly.

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