By Kat Wilkerson, Content Marketing Specialist at Alertus Technologies

Quickly notifying personnel and facility occupants is critical during an emergency.

By leveraging all available notification modalities, Alertus can help you reach everyone at your facility — inside, outside, and off-property — with consistent and timely notifications. Dr. Ben Brewer, Alertus’ Director of Mass Notification System (MNS) Solutions, has over 38 years of experience in emergency and crisis management, continuity of operations, and information security. He oversees client-focused solution design to meet customer needs and enhance system configuration and implementation outcomes.

To help you enhance your emergency communications, Ben answered the following questions about how an organization can benefit by working toward optimal readiness, regardless of its industry type or market sector.

Mass Notification Systems Solutions Expert

Name: Ben Brewer 
Title: Director, Mass Notification System Solutions
Organization: Alertus Technologies

What do you consider optimal emergency readiness, and how can organizations benefit from working toward this?

When I think about organizations at optimal emergency readiness – what we like to call a “complete customer” at Alertus – I think about what is often necessary to have a comprehensive, mature emergency notification program. Through a multi-layered notification approach, organizations can utilize hardware and software solutions and reliable activation methods to ensure they reach everyone, everywhere, every time. 

While the attributes may vary from organization to organization, a mature emergency notification program often includes:

• Understanding the threats and risks the organization and its stakeholders face and the likelihood of their manifestation;

• Documenting emergency notification requirements;

• Developing and implementing emergency response plans that include emergency and risk communication policies and procedures;

• Identifying stakeholder groups and entering into discourse to increase stakeholder awareness and obtain their input, participation, and support of the emergency and risk communication program elements;

• Acquiring, installing, and implementing selected technologies; and 

• Consistently employing the selected technologies with a published plan and other program documentation, including routine testing, continuing education and awareness training, obtaining stakeholder feedback on system use, and incorporating feedback and other lessons learned into the program to foster continuous improvement.

When an organization can achieve the foundations of a mature emergency notification program, they can demonstrate an awareness of the threat environment, stakeholder needs, organizational culture dynamics, and effectively communicate with stakeholders during volatile situations to reduce risk to life, property, and the environment.

What notification challenges could an organization face when not at optimal emergency readiness?

Based on my academic research, challenges would likely include the failure to immediately notify stakeholders of a threat to their safety; ambiguous and otherwise confusing alert notifications; false and erroneous alerts; an inability to acquire and implement suitable technologies to meet emergency notification requirements; and decreased stakeholder participation in, and support for the organization’s emergency notification program (e.g., reluctance to register to receive alerts) (Brewer Jr, B. D. 2021).

Reference:

Brewer Jr, B. D. (2021). Identifying and Categorizing the Strategies Higher Education Emergency Managers Used to Implement Emergency Notification Systems: a Qualitative Study (Doctoral dissertation, Colorado Technical University).

Could you provide examples of Alertus solutions to help an organization overcome these challenges?

This question is difficult to answer in a way that applies to every organization because organizational threats, stakeholder groups, compliance requirements, organizational culture, and program maturity differ from one organization to another. 

Therefore, a solution deemed appropriate for Organization A may not be suitable for Organization B. Alertus Technologies offers a variety of alert solutions that can be employed on their own or synergistically with other alerting modalities. One of its key strengths is that the Alertus System is fully scalable and tailored to meet stakeholders' needs within the context of the situation, environment, and culture. With this in mind, organizations have the control necessary to ensure the alerting modalities selected and employed during a specific situation are appropriate to the audience at risk (e.g., desktop alerting, overhead PA announcements, mobile app alerting, etc.). Furthermore, the modalities selected and how they perform to display and annunciate the alert can differ from situation to situation. 

Finally, when organizations implement the Alertus System, they can employ business rules to automate and influence alerting behavior to support dynamic alerting in complex situations, including incidents like a hazardous materials release or active threats. These rules enhance stakeholder awareness while decreasing the time required to activate alerts, positively influencing situational awareness.

How does becoming a “complete customer” increase business continuity?

A business continuity plan aims to foster organizational resiliency, which is the organization’s ability to absorb an incident's impact and promptly recover from any disruption dictated by established recovery time objectives. 

Being a complete customer regarding emergency notification in support of business continuity means that the organization has taken the time to identify and prioritize threats and risks. They’ve also identified and established relationships with stakeholder groups, developed emergency response plans, identified partners with suitable technologies and expertise within the emergency notification industry, and implemented the emergency notification system to foster program maturity. 

When consistently applied, these elements can increase awareness, decrease the impacts in response to a hazard, and increase the organization’s ability to return to pre-crisis operations.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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