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Crisis Connections

With good planning, Web and mobile technologies can help find and inform employees in the event of a disaster. A global company shows how.

By Susannah Patton

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McCrae's experienceand the company's ability to communicate broadly through a variety of channelsshows how companies hit by disaster can effectively track employees using simple Web and mobile technologies. During the London bombings, many companies suffered from a total information blackout because most communications lines were blocked. Gale GFS, however, was able to find its employees, make sure its properties were safe and send alerts to those in charge within a short period of time. This kind of system, which relies on cell phones, e-mails, Black Berrys and pagers to communicate, is simple but, unaccountably and unfortunately, rare. Many companies simply don't have systems in place to keep track of and communicate with employees during and just after a crisis, experts say.

"It's not just putting out fires; it's about staying in business, and one of the essential steps is tracking employees," says Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University. "Technology can help you do this."

The Limits of E-Mail

Gale GFS's crisis management system was born out of the company's desire to better communicate with its employees on a day-to-day basis. The company started to build its Incident Reporting System in 2003 when its largest client, AT&T, asked for help. The telecom giant was looking for a way to let employees know, in real-time, what was happening when there was a major incidenta hurricane or power outageat one of its locations. "They wanted to be able to let everyone know what was happening even as the situation was changing every few minutes," says Chris Messineo, assistant VP for IT at Gale GFS (a unit of the Gale Company), which manages and oversees properties around the world for clients including AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Toys "R" Us.

Messineo, working with Gale GFS president and CIO Ian Marlow, decided they needed to create an alternative to e-mail, which can be an inefficient way to find employees during a crisis because it can create a tangle of messages that cross each other. The two had initially designed the company portal in 2002 in an effort to share information inside the company, and had more recently added functions such as file-sharing to allow vendors and clients to use it as well. Messineo stresses that the system, built using Microsoft's ASP.net and SQL Server, was designed with simplicity in mind. "In fact, its power is in its simplicity," he says, noting thatso farit has never locked up or crashed and that all of the code used to run it can fit on a single floppy disk. The system had to be robust and easy to use, even for employees connecting from dial-up modems in airports. And unlike more complex Web conferencing systems, employees access it directly from any Web browser and don't need to download software to do so. Messineo says his team was successful because they kept the application simple. And while AT&T was the first to request such a system for its property managers, all of Gale GFS's clients can now use the IRS.