Volume 8
sis communication discipline, and directly addresses some of the core 2016 Crisis Communication
Trends.
AtHoc significantly simplifies the management of
emergency situations:
Real-Time Alert Rules
• Enables users to create rules for forwarding
alerts received from external organizations and
sources.
• It also helps operators to predefine response
processes on common incident types. For example, a hospital receiving a notification from
fire or police that a major crisis has led to a large
number of injuries will not lose time initializing
and launching its own alerts.
• The incoming notifications will automatically be
routed to the appropriate medical and administrative personnel.
• A recent example of the need to plan and coordinate communication processes is January
2016’s Winter Storm Jones, as described here.
Automated Staff Mustering
• A fill count capability automatically contacts a
roster of staff members who possess the right
skills and training until the required number of
people has been reached, and acknowledged
their assignments.
• At that point, the system stops seeking additional respondents, freeing up resources and
personnel for other priorities. For example, in
a chemical plant, all available qualified workers
can be summoned to the scene of a problem,
until enough people have responded to cover all
of the contingencies.
Management Alerting
• Pre-configured escalation rules that automatically alert supervisors when line staff cannot
be reached, or decline an assignment for some
reason.
• This enables managers to analyze an issue,
and communicate the situation up the chain, requesting assistance from senior individuals.
• In an IT organization, as an example, if a critical
system goes down and the normally assigned
technician is unavailable, qualified managers
up to the CIO can be called to step in and fill the
gap, or activate a predetermined contingency
plan.
Severity-Codified Notifications
Oct/Nov 2016 Edition
• Easy-to-use templates enable organizations to
designate the level of severity when setting up
and issuing an alert.
• The look and feel of the alert will automatically
correspond to the seriousness of the situation.
• Supervisors can receive emails with a familiar
red headers at the beginning of the crisis, to denote extreme urgency, in addition to any other
forms of contact.
• The personnel contacted during the fill count
can also receive supplementary emails with the
red headers.
• However, people told to wait and be available
for later shifts will receive companion emails
with orange or yellow headers, indicating a lower level of urgency.
Together, AtHoc innovations significantly improve
rapid response time by turning complex business
processes into efficient, effective, crisis communications to deliver faster, more automated actions.
(As an example, see how Camp Pendleton utilizes the AtHoc
emergency notification system, for Camp Pendleton residents in the event of an emergency. Courtesy of Camp Pendleton, AtHoc and YouTube)
A plethora of prominent government, military
and law enforcement agencies have deployed
AtHoc applications including (but not limited
to):
•
United States Coast guard
•
U.S. Senate
•
The Pentagon
•
Department of Veterans Affairs
•
The U.S. Department of the Treasury
•
U.S. Air Force.
The U.S. military bases throughout Europe, have
implemented the AtHoc emergency alerting system and used it effectively to reach and account
for the status of their personal during the recent
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