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

Each case or incident is archived in the system so that others can retrieve them from the database in order to study them. "From reading and analyzing the information, we can gather best practices and bring them back to the company as a whole," says Chris Furlong, manager of education and training for Gale GFS. Each session, however, is available for viewing only by the employees working with a specific client so as to maintain security. For example, if an AT&T site experiences a power outage, only Gale employees working on that account (and, of course, their client, AT&T) will be able to see what's going on. Furlong says that new employees can be trained on the system in 10 minutes.

Before the IRS system was developed, employees had to stay on the phone for long stretches in order to stay up to date, says William Mellin, a Gale GFS VP. With the IRS, people can do their job while they check the site, or get information via handheld devices. "It's more productive to have people working than tied to a conference call or webcast," Mellin adds.

People Versus Property

When the London bombs went off, Marlow was watching the early morning news on TV at his home in New Jersey. He immediately picked up the phone. Within minutes an incident report was opened on the company intranet and Marlow had accounted for the safety of the top four executives in the region, including McCrae, who had provided the initial information to a colleague in France. Then McCrae got in touch by phone with the manager of Gale GFS's account with GlaxoSmithKline, one of its largest clients in the London area, who was able to log on to the intranet and account for all employees at those London facilities through the IRS.

When all employees in the London area had been accounted for, Marlow sent out a worldwide e-mail alert. "As a global company, we have people all over the world, and in the event of a major disaster, everyone wants to know about people's safety," Marlow says.

Meanwhile, in London, McCrae had convinced the owner of a pub in Leicester Square to allow him and two colleagues to hole up there for the afternoon. With the trains and buses stopped, traffic closed, and phone and cellular networks failing, McCrae spent the next hours sending and receiving information from New Jersey via his BlackBerry, which was drifting in and out of service. "That day was filled with lots of uncertainty, and many companies struggled to communicate," says McCrae, who was able to feed information about the attack and its aftermath to colleagues who then updated the IRS. "I didn't realize the power of the portal until then," he says.

• Email
• Print
• Comments
• Digg This
• SlashDot