Florida State Aims for ‘Easy Button’ Solution to Mass Notification

Institutions cannot afford to have an emergency notification system that takes minutes to verify an emergency, draft a message, seek approval and/or send the alert. To address this challenge, Florida State University, in conjunction with Siemens, has developed a centralized activation portal for its FSU ALERT emergency notification system.

<p>The FSU ALERT EZ “Local Operator Control” is located in the university’s police dispatch office, and is equipped with several “EZ buttons” denoting different types of emergencies.</p>Siemens proposed use of its Sygnal product, which it sells as a standalone emergency notification system in direct competition with all the other vendors on the market. However, Siemens would make Sygnal work with FSU’s existing infrastructure. Rather than replace any aspect of FSU’s existing system, Sygnal simply became a layer on top of all others. The advantage of this is that if for any reason Sygnal fails, FSU can still activate each of its emergency notification systems directly through their native controls. In terms of redundancy, this is a critical benefit of this solution.

On-Campus, Off-Campus Stakeholders Involved             

It is important to note that this sort of project is not entirely “turnkey” on the part of Siemens. It required the input and teamwork of a large number of individuals on and off campus. FSU’s IT services designated a project manager who coordinated all the technical details behind the scenes. The networking people needed to run conduit, install network drops, configure IP addresses, coordinate with CenturyLink to install a dedicated T1 PRI line for the server, access server closets, physically mount the servers on racks and so much more. 

The telecommunications people needed to configure the voicemail and other systems to integrate with Siemens. The enterprise resource management people needed to configure the E-mail servers. FSU’s third-party siren vendor, American Signal, needed to custom manufacture an interface for Siemens to connect to.

Related Article: Other Communications Upgrades Delay FSU’s ‘Easy Button’ Implementation

When all was said and done, a few dozen different individuals were in some way involved in the project. (It is also important to calculate the costs of all these contributions, as they are not included with your primary project vendor’s contract.) Having a good project manager on board to coordinate everything is critical. 

Messages Are Received in 3 Minutes or Less

Upon completion of this project, all of FSU’s goals and objectives were met. Siemens configured a central activation system using a combination of its Sygnal and Vantage products. This system now consolidates and integrates the 10 primary and nine secondary delivery technologies that are part of the FSU ALERT emergency notification system. All 19 systems can be activated for any one of the pre-approved, pre-programmed scenarios from a single point.

In the FSU police department’s communications (dispatch) office, there is a bright yellow box with the FSU ALERT logo on it. When one opens the door, a panel of buttons matched with the pre-scripted scenarios. Simply press the button next to the corresponding situation. That’s it! Instantly, the appropriate emergency notification message is delivered by 19 different means simultaneously.

Let’s review the math.  Before this project, FSU’s best case scenario for FSU ALERT activation was 10 minutes. Add to that the 15 minute delivery time for SMS text or 60 minutes for E-mail. Twenty-five minutes to over an hour for emergency notification was simply unacceptable.

Now, a three-second activation process is followed by message deliveries to all recipients in three minutes or less. It would be hard to make much greater improvement upon that.

While this project may not realize any monetary cost savings, it should be clear to all the benefits in terms of time and life safety. If this project prevents even one life from being lost due to a delay in warning, then it has more than paid for itself. 

Lessons Learned: Properly Communicate With Vendors

In retrospect, FSU knew that it was going to be a slow bumpy process. That just comes with the territory of being a pioneer. Were there opportunities to have made things a little smoother? Certainly.

One example is that FSU switched SMS text and mass E-mail providers midway through the project to Blackboard Connect, which is in direct competition with Siemens. This caused some initial political tensions, but moreover, required Siemens to abandon some of their early work with the previous providers. The good news is that FSU was able to intercept and redirect Siemens before their development was complete and totally lost.

FSU could have done a better job in expressing its expectations to Blackboard Connect during that contract negotiation process. It may not have been clear to them what implications the Siemens project would have on them. Companies like Blackboard Connect need to realize that this situation is not isolated. As more institutions follow in FSU’s footsteps and seek to consolidate, integrate and create their own easy buttons, their clients will be demanding that they work with Siemens and other integration companies.  Have patience. As good as a company like Siemens may get at integration, it will still take a lot of time and coordination to implement at each institution. If becomes as easy as buying a box off the shelf and plugging it in, that will be amazing. Until then, this is the next best thing.  Make sure that all pertinent stakeholders (IT, police, communications, university relations, vendors, et al) are on board and willing to make the project a priority and a success.

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