The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Emergency Communications Management

Someone has been paying attention for the past couple of years, and this new article from EDUCAUSE Review is either a must-read or a must-bookmark:

Within an incredibly short period—perhaps less than twenty-four months—the need for emergency preparedness has risen to a higher level of urgency than at any other time in the history of academe. Large or small, public or private, higher education institutions are seriously considering the dual problems of notification and communications management when potentially life-threatening events confront a campus environment. . . . On the one hand, there seems to be a growing tendency toward violence; on the other hand, an increasingly rich collection of notification, communications, and management tools can assist in mitigating the impact of these situations. . . . [t]he rich variety of tools and solutions leads to two important questions for colleges and universities to consider. First, how can these technologies be best leveraged to benefit emergency notification services? And second, what are the implications of all of these options on emergency communications management policies and operational procedures? We define an emergency notification system (ENS) as a specific technical service designed to achieve mass notification in the event of an incident demanding such an action. Emergency communications management (ECM) refers to the policies, procedures, and operations acting in concert with an ENS.

To help institutions answer these two questions and also to provide insight into the basic parameters of emergency communications in higher education today, the Steering Committee of the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU Converged Communications Working Group (CCWG)1 (http://www.educause.edu/ConvergedCommunicationsWorkingGroup/13524) recently sent a short survey to a group of carefully selected colleges and universities.2 The objective was to discover the nature of the work being accomplished at these institutions. The responses to this survey also helped to inform two case studies, prepared by the CCWG Steering Committee, on ENS and ECM solutions at Virginia Tech and the University of Iowa.