In Depth

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

Keep It Simple and Flexible

Gale GFS employees agree that policies urging employees to keep in touch with each other are as important in a crisis as the technology itself. Adding the Incident Reporting Systemwhich operates as a sort of business blogto Gale GFS's portal site was not complicated, Messineo says. Essentially, an employee can log on to the Web-based system with a user name and password and write about a hurricane, an explosion or any other incident. Gale GFS designed and built its system to automatically send out an e-mail notification to everyone in the region. Through an online control panel, administrators can determine who gets notified by region and by company. E-mail alerts pop up on cell phones and BlackBerry pagers, as well as on computer screens. Originally, Messineo says, AT&T said it wanted to be able to track 40 fields of informationranging from precise location to detailed weather conditions and number of employeesfor each incident. That level of complexity, however, would mean that the system would be slow. To speed things up, Messineo decided to reduce the number of categories within each type of incident to a maximum of eight. The result: Employees can connect to the system using a 56K modem with pages loading in under three seconds. And they can also access the system from an Internet café or any other Web connection.

According to Marlow, who is also COO of Gale GFS's parent, the Gale Company, the main challenge was to make sure that top executives could communicate with employees from inside an affected location using multiple forms of communication. Just after the 9/11 attacks, for example, telephone traffic was rerouted and it was impossible to call the World Trade Center area using landlines. In the case of the London bombings, the cellular network was essentially shut down, but Internet and BlackBerry communication was still working.

Blogging for Safety

When a Gale GFS employee first logs on to his computer, he sees a welcome screen filled with company news and announcements, similar to countless other corporate intranet sites. Gale GFS's, however, has a small box in the upper left-hand corner: the Incident Reporting System. Depending on the employee's location, that box may contain information on power outages, fires or impending hurricanes. Like a journal or blog, the entries track developments and conversations between employees.

For example, a property manager in Houston logged on to the IRS on Sept. 23, 2005, alerting employees in the area as Hurricane Rita approached. The subsequent back and forth between the property manager and other employees chronicles the weather reports and developing plans to secure property and account for employees. Each time an alert was placed on the intranet site, employees were notified on their mobile devices and via e-mail.

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