How Mass Notification has evolved
submitted article
Frank Mahdavi of MIR3 looks at the how Mass Notification has become a mainstream Business Continuity tool.
|
The Evolution of Mass Notification
|
|
Events that Heralded the Need - The Cold War
Electronic mass notification gained prominence in 1963 when the U.S. government implemented the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) to quickly warn the entire population of any emergency. In that era, school children routinely participated in nuclear bomb safety drills, and many of us recall a voice declaring over the television or radio, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. For the next 60 seconds … this is only a test,” followed by a loud, one-minute tone.
That system was replaced in 1997 by the Emergency Alert System (EAS), designed to enable the President of the United States to speak to the entire country within minutes. The EAS also relies on TV and radio, but includes analog, digital, terrestrial, and satellite broadcast. EAS is effective for reaching a very large geographical area, but it isn’t flexible enough to target a specific area such as a county, city, or neighbourhood. Better solutions were needed for Emergency and Business Continuity Personnel.
Localized catastrophes during the past two decades and the adoption of many additional communication modes have increased the need for a new class of mass notification systems that can effectively warn many people at once in a specific affected area using the latest communication channels. For most of the world, Sept. 11, 2001, was the wake-up call. But for the Department of Defense, the wake-up call came a few years earlier, in the form of a truck bomb.
1996: DOD’s Wakeup Call in Saudi Arabia
On the evening of June 25, 1996, a fuel truck drove up to a U.S. Air Force base in Saudi Arabia, parking near Khobar Towers, a housing complex on the base. A few men got out of the truck and escaped in a getaway car. Sentries on the roof quickly identified the truck as a bomb, reported the threat to Central Security Control (CSC), and started evacuating the building, knocking on doors and calling out warnings. Meanwhile, CSC started the process of activating the base’s “Giant Voice,” a loudspeaker system used to issue voice or siren alerts across the entire base. Unfortunately, the process was so awkward and complicated that Giant Voice could not be turned on in time. The sentries could only evacuate three floors before the bomb went off, ripping through the building with a force estimated at nearly 20,000 pounds of TNT. While the sentries saved many lives with their efforts, 20 men were killed and nearly 400 were injured.
In his analysis of the incident, published in July 2007, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen coined the phrase “mass notification,” noting that measures such as knocking on doors and word-of-mouth were “… not a substitute for an automated mass notification system.” This incident was the impetus for the Department of Defense authoring its pioneering document in 2002, “DOD Minimum Antiterrorism Standards for Buildings,” which defines mass notification as “… the capability to provide real-time information and instructions to people, in a building, area, site, or installation using intelligible voice communications including visible signals, text, and graphics, and possibly including other tactile or other communication methods.” The DOD realized that the old way of doing things — manual phone trees, manual one-way e-mail blasts, paging, and word-of-mouth — were woefully inadequate to the task of emergency notification and Business Continuity , and that an automated solution using a wide variety of communication modes was needed. Soon the rest of the world would realize the same.
2000– 2009: One Catastrophe after Another
The past decade has had more than its fair share of terrorist bombings and natural disasters that underscore the need for automated mass notification:
In every case, an automated, rapid two-way mass notification system able to reach many people at once on multiple communication modes — such as cell phone, landline, e-mail, text message, pager, fax, TTY for the hearing impaired and BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN — could have helped save lives and reduce confusion in the midst of these calamities.
In particular, two of these events changed the way we think about public safety and business continuity. During the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, a mass notification system would have been instrumental in guiding people to safety and coordinating the efforts of public safety personnel before and after the towers collapsed. It also would have helped those companies with offices in the towers to better communicate with their employees to monitor their status, provide support, assess their business situation, and activate recovery plans.
The Virginia Tech campus shootings, in which a lone shooter killed 32 people and injured many more, was also a major catalyst, serving as the clarion call to educational institutions nationwide to immediately implement mass notification systems to keep students safe and parents informed during critical, fast-moving situations.
The Technological Path to Mass Notification - 1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s, notification consisted of point-to-point, one-way e-mails and pages, with e-mail only working within closed corporate networks. The early ’90s saw the introduction of e-mail for the masses, but only with subscription services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL, at dial-up speeds. Meanwhile, computer-generated text-to-speech was so primitive as to be completely impractical except for the most cryptic alerts, used primarily by corporate IT personnel for network maintenance issues. And standards for handling voice dialogues between humans and computers didn’t yet exist, making it difficult to develop notification systems that could interact directly with people using speech. At the same time, telephony infrastructure was expensive and bandwidth was limited, meaning, one could only make a few outgoing calls at a time.
The 1990s saw significant advances in Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and T1 technology, dramatically decreasing the cost of telephony ports while increasing the capacity of trunk lines. By the year 2000, costs and capacities were at a point that sending an urgent message with thousands of simultaneous phone calls became practical and cost effective. E-mail had also advanced to become a universal communication medium, making it practical for reaching many people quickly.
2000s: The Confluence of Enabling Technologies
As the need for effective mass communication intensified throughout the last decade, technologies have emerged that make such solutions possible. Chief among them are VXML, improved text-to-speech, SMS, and Web 2.0.
Part 3: New Uses of Mass Notification Technology
The events of the 1990s and 2000s have made clear the need for automated, rapid, two-way mass notification systems, and subsequently, many government agencies, municipal public safety departments, and educational institutions worldwide have implemented such systems.
At the same time, enterprise risk management and business continuity have matured as core corporate disciplines, with mass notification playing a key role in ensuring employee safety and carrying out continuity and recovery plans. Companies large and small, global and regional, have started using mass notification systems, representing numerous industries including manufacturing, retail, financial services, transportation, energy, food service, and healthcare. This trend will continue to grow as more and more companies implement risk and emergency management as vital parts of their businesses.
Mass notification systems also play a critical role in helping IT departments maintain network uptime, instantly alerting IT staff when there is a network outage or urgent help desk issue. The importance of this cannot be overstated, as much of the world depends on IT uptime, and every minute of downtime can result in significant lost revenue and interruption of important services.
In addition, many organizations have realized that their mass notification systems can provide real productivity gains in their daily operations, greatly increasing the return on their investment. Examples include:
The uses for mass notification will only continue to expand in the coming years for public safety, risk and emergency management, as well as daily operations. What began as a tool to keep people safe in a localized area can provide myriad benefits to people and organizations worldwide.
Frank Mahdavi, chief strategy officer for MIR3, Inc., has fulfilled strategic roles in the software engineering and telecommunications industries for nearly three decades. For the past eight years at MIR3, Mahdavi has been responsible for tracking and analyzing mass communication technology and market trends.
|
Jobs & Contracts
JOBS AVAILABLE
JOBS NEEDED
CONTRACTS
Find out more
RESOURCES
SECURITY & CT
Don't be the weak link
SUPPLY CHAIN CONTINUITY
Hosting services provided by:
