The good folks at the National Weather Service are conducting an experiment at 5 of their mid-west offices to see how their use of language can better influence people in the decisions they make (see articles: CNN and Reuters). We have heard many of our Clients are experimenting with similar types of aggressive messaging to drive their scenarios to higher success rates. It has me thinking how our amazing new relevance engine building technology can support forms to allow business continuity professionals to optionally select an impact message. Take the following example I was able to kick out from scratch in 5 minutes in our drag'n'drop UI and message designer which provides selectable impact language that I pulled from the CNN and Reuters articles:

Just another example of how a xMatters can provide better emergency notifications using our relevance engine technology! Ask other vendors to build you a form like this that matches your unique communication needs in 5 minutes or less:)

At this point, I think I've read enough scary warnings about possible infrastructure problems during the London Olympics that I'd like to make business continuity headaches a whole new event at the games.  The latest one comes from the Cabinet Office via the Guardian warning British businesses that they might see disruptions in their internet connections during key points at the games. Everything from full on outages to bandwidth caps are on the table. 

The good news is that the warnings are being put as well as good general guidelines on how to prepare your business for the Olympic games.  The possibility of internet disruptions is a good exercise to run through for business continuity professionals.  Let's consider the impact and explore alternatives from a few different perspectives.

If you are a business continuity professional tasked with managing communications for incidents, how would an internet outage impact you?

• With no internet access, you could only initiate communications from a mobile device, or by using calling your notification vendor's call center
• To get updates on how many people had received the messages, what their responses were, or any other report, you would again have to rely on mobile access, or contact the vendor's call center

To actually get messages such as "work from home today" or just provide updates during the games to employees, you must have diversity in your communication channels:

• Internet disruptions mean email becomes less reliable, both on the sending and receiving side.  If an employee loses internet access at home, they're certainly not going to get your messages.  If you (or your email provider) lose internet access, that's even worse for getting information out.
• SMS is a great way to get short messages to people, but it's also not guaranteed to work as communication infrastructure gets overloaded.  You could see everything from delayed delivery, to messages not making it to their recipients at all.
• Phone calls, with options for both land lines and mobile phones, are another good alternative to disseminate information
• Call centers where employees can call in to retrieve information can provide another "pull" mechanism
• Get the message out using social media, where appropriate

When communication systems become unreliable giving people the ability to respond becomes even more important.  You can't rely on service provider updates that confirm receipt to the system, but not the actual individual.  That's true of email, and SMS in some cases.  Even simple responses such as "I got the message" will make reporting far more reliable.

If you'd like to share your business continuity team's approach to dealing with communication disruption during the London Olympics, sound off in the comments!

Abbas.

I'm based out in Washington DC and have lived on the east coast for a long time and as such have no experience with what an earthquake actually feels like.  That statement was true until yesterday afternoon at about 1:53pm EDT when I felt and heard a rumbling sound that was just a little too intense to be a passing truck.  It took me the first 5 seconds just to clue into what was actually going on.

Immediately after that, I realized that I actually have no idea about what I'm actually supposed to do during an earthquake.  My wife yelled at me to get into a doorway and I yelled back "I think we're supposed to go to the bathtub."  For the record, according to FEMA, here is what you're actually supposed to do.

Working with our clients all over the world, I get to hear about the varying experiences that they've had dealing with nature's display of its powers, at varying scales.  There was minimal damage from the quake itself, but I did get to experience first hand the communication threads that start up following any widespread event.

Before the shaking even fully stopped, my first status update of "Was that an earthquake that I just felt in DC?" was out on Facebook and Twitter (don't judge me).  It was quickly commented on and retweeted as confirmations started to come in from my friends/followers all across the east coast.  Within 5 minutes, all that I could see on Facebook were references to the earthquake.  Some providing details as they learned them, including images from the USGS website showing the intensity and epicenter of the earthquake.  Others were letting everyone know that they were OK.

In parallel, I texted family members to let them know that we were OK to preempt the inbound calls that would start as soon as the news got out.  I had to use text messaging, because I couldn't get a call through to anyone.  Lines were all jammed up and continued to be in that state on and off for another 2 hours.

Turns out that they never got my texts. And of course I had no idea that they had not heard from me. Luckily,while they were trying to reach me, my brother had seen the updates on Facebook and let them know that all was well.

What I learned from the experience simply backs up the strategy that I recommend to all of our clients.  Don't rely on a single, or even a couple of communications channels.  In the event of an emergency, prioritize and use all the channels at your disposal to ensure that the  right message gets out to the people that need it using the mechanism that they are likely to receive it through.  Every channel has its own reach and should be to dessiminate information into the right circles taking advantage of network effects to pass it along as needed.

What was your communication experience during the earthquake?  And yes, for all those on the west coast, we easties are very soft when it comes to the ground shaking beneath our feet.

Abbas.

I just wrapped up a great week at Gartner's Security and Risk Summit in Washington D.C.  My primary focus was the Business Continuity Management track with some dabbling in the Risk Management and Security tracks as well.  Overall, the event was great with lots of educuation, networking, and discussion opportunities.

For those of you who couldn't make it, I grabbed some tweetbites (if that's not a real word, I hereby lay claim to it) from the social media stream of the event that capture the core themes of the sessions that I was interested in:

Day 1 - Picking BCM consultants with Roberta Witty and John Morency, Key risk indicators with Paul Proctor, Security risk & crisis management with former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff,

Day 2 - BCM standards comparison with Donald Byrne, Reportrisk to the board with Paul Proctor, Social Media security and privacy with Marne E. Gordon, Social software and recovery with Roberta Witty and Andrew Walls, iPad data safety with John Girard, Uptime all the time with Donna Scott, Emergency mass notification servics with John Girard and Jeff Vining

Day 3 - CFO's impact on technology investment decisions with John E. Van Decker, Domestic homeland terrorism threat with Mark Giuliano (AD counterterrorism at FBI), Modernizing recovery into resilience with Donna Scott and John Morency, Mobile technologies in disaster recovery with John Girard, and keynote with David Pogue

Day 4 - Preparing for planetary defense with Col. Lindley Johnson and the closing keynote.

All the sessions at the event were recorded and should be available for viewing at some point soon (check with Gartner for details) so if you couldn't make it, catch some of the content via replay.

I look forward to the next event!

Abbas.

After an introduction to the topic and a lengthy post about how location can drive better communications, I had planned a few others to cover some of the other types of information that fall into the larger topic as well.  However, I thought it would be worth while to take a short detour this week to cover privacy in the context of location data.  Why?  Well, unless you've turned off TVs, radio, and unplugged from the internet, you've probably heard some of the hubub about Apple capturing detailed location data on iPads and iPhones from the very first time the devices were turned on till today.

If you did miss it, here are some links to get you caught up:

O'Reilly Radar: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad?  Apple is Tracking Your Moves

Wired (multiple posts): Location Data Collection Can't be Turned Off, Why You Should Care, Why and How Location Data is Being Tracked, iPhone Tracking There is a Map for That

Everyone has been covering this and of couse the second round was about Android phones recording location history too.  BlackBerry phones have been trackable for a while, just took enabling it on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and accepting it on the phone.  Apparently, secretly tracking our movements is its own industry.

Senator Al Franken has been demanding answers from Steve Jobs and now apparently Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass) is worried about this information becoming a treasure trove for sex predators. 

In fact, it's hard to find any reasonable analysis of the issue at all.  One particularly interesting one points out that the information has been there since the iPhone's first came out.  It's just that this time, it caught the attention of more people and is now of course getting blown out of proportion.  So what are the real issues here?

The reality is that the information on the iPhone's and Android phones both require physical access to devices and only anonymized versions are sent periodically to Apple and Google. Is it really that much worse than someone gaining access to your phone and rifling through call history, text messages, email, and everything else that your other apps store? 

Yes, it would be nice if we had more control over some of the history, but for right now, I'm just fine with the balance between privacy, security, and functionality that my iPhone offers.

Where do you stand on the issue?  When it comes to company issued mobile devices, where is the right place to draw the privacy line?  Comments below!

In case you missed it, last week I started covering this topic with a brief introduction to what will become at least a 8-10 part series.  I'd love to say that it was a long planned topic, but like most interesting ones, it started with something more personal - being offline for a few days and stepping back into inboxes at capacity.

In this second part on the topic of targeting communications, I wanted to cover location awareness and how it plays into filtering out irrelevant content.  I'll use a couple of examples in discussing the topic, while deftly skirting the whole privacy minefield - I'll step into that in another post.

I tend to classify location information about a person into two types:

1. Static - Requires some type of user action for an update, and includes services such as:

• HR and other corporate systems which would provide location information such as primary office location, home address and the like
• Location based social networking sites which require some kind of check-in: Foursquare, Gowalla, Scvngr, Facebook Places, Google Latitude, Yelp, etc.
• Geotags contained in posts: Twitter updates, Flickr posts, etc.
• Location based (just in time) chat services: Yobongo
• Travel information: Aggregated in TripIt, Tripcase, or feeds from sites where travel was booked
• Schedule information: Out of office auto-replies, shared calendars, on-call & shift rotation records



2. Dynamic - No end user action required, kept updated automatically and would include services such as:

• Mobile phone location - either GPS or cell tower localization driven
• Local positionining - WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID, NFC
• Location based social networking sites (or their derivates) with auto check-in capabilities: Future check in, Checkmate

How could all of this data be used for more effective communication? Here is one example:

Emergency communication as part of business continuity plan, such as evacuating a building.

Traditional approach:

• Send out a message blast to everyone (using email, SMS, voice, smoke signals) to a list of people who are supposed to work in the building, or to totally CYA, just send it to everyone in the company.
• Problem #1: If you sent it to everyone in the company, you cause a secondary effect of pandemonium when people start caling their coworkers to make sure they are OK.  Also, you can only cry wolf with the "EMERGENCY" in the subject line for so long before people start to ignore you.
• Problem #2: If you sent it to a list of people - who keeps that list current to make sure that you have everyone who works in the building covered?  What about temps and contractors?  Partners?  People who are working from this building for just a week or two?
• Essentially you either go to broad broad in your message, or you miss people.  Both are ineffective and potentially dangerous.



Location aware approach:

• Send a message to everyone who is in the building
• Determining who gets the message is a just-in-time activity that takes advantage of the best information available at the time
• Start with dynamic location information based on who badged into the building and is currently inside
• Extend outward with static location data about who is supposed to be the building but for whom dynamic location information may not be available
• Secondary communications can be triggered using organizational information about everyone who is in the building, notifying their supervisors as well, for example

Location information can not only drive targeting the people, but can also be used to make the content more relevant as well as governing what response and engagement options should be presented to a user.

There are lots of other potential scenarios where it could be used, but instead of turning this blog post into a short novel, I'll open up the floor for more via comments.  I'll update the blog post with with the best ideas.  Here are some seeds if you'd like to build them out:

- Engaging IT field services engineers based on their proximity to incidents

- Connecting people with similar interests together for events

- Sending out reminders (and coupons) to customers when they are near specific locations

- Directing flow of people at major events

- Location based marketing

- Traffic alerts & rerouting

Abbas Haider Ali.



I think we've all received messages that make us think: "Does this organization/person know anything about me at all?"  Irrelevant communication. It's at a minimum annoying, at it's worst it can be dangerous.  Here are some examples that I've received just this week:

1. Suggestions to buy baby products
2. An invitation to a local DC tech event while I'm in Orlando next week
3. Safety recall notice about a car that I sold 4 years ago
4. Information about a class action suit for a product I never owned



A lot of this stuff just gets sent out to everyone on a massive list.  The reality is that there is tons of public information about me that a company could gain access to, and even more of it would be available if we've done business together in the past, that would clearly make their communications to me more relevant.  For the examples above, here is how things would change:

1. My Facebook information would clearly indicate that I am married, but have no children
2. TripIt, Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, would make it clear that I'm not in DC next week
3. Facebook profile information & status updates, Twitter posts, credit report information clearly indicate that I no longer own the car
4. Where did they get the idea that I owned the product to begin with? If it's something cool (gadget for example) I would probably have tweeted about it or referenced it on Facebook somewhere

If these organizations were more careful about sending me stuff that I actually cared about, I would actually pay attention when I got a SMS, email, or phone call from them vs. just tuning them out.

So what's the solution?  Where possible, organizations should use what they know about their employees, partners, and customers to messsage only people to whom the content is relevant.  Otherwise they risk getting ignored when connecting really counts.  There is of course a balance to be struck with what information you want to share with each organization and that's why personal data & social history sharing information management (I'll let someone else come up with a more concise name) will become an important area of development.

Consider this an introduction to the topic since there are lots of areas to dig into here, ranging from what would constitute a "complete" professional and personal profile, fencing data with different levels of access, how to actually use the information for targeting, etc.

Comments on suggestions on where to take this topic are welcome!

Abbas Haider Ali.

Image credit: WebDesignerDepot

Last night I went to sleep with thoughts of iPad 2 launch day in mind and woke up to scenes of carnage and chaos caused by the quake in Japan.  It was a sobering reminder of what's really important.  I've been working in the San Francisco area this week so I was pinged by lots of people who wanted to pass along the tsunami warnings.  The communications came in via lots of different channels - phone calls (parents), SMS (close contact friends), Facebook (range of closeness), and Twitter (grab bag of people).  My link to all of them was my mobile phone and once again highlighted just how central a smartphone can become to your communications.

Like a lot of people, I also tried to get in contact with everyone I could think of who might have been impacted by the quake to make sure that they were OK. In Japan, it was increasingly difficult to reach people on their mobile phones since capacity was being reserved for coordinating emergency responders.  The people who were easiest to reach were the ones who had an established patterns of connecting to people in multiple places.  If you couldn't reach them on their mobile phone either live or via SMS, you could try land lines.  If that didn't work you had Facebook or Twitter to go to.  I wasn't the only one experiencing these issues as highlighted by CNET News. 

Through every situation that requires emergency communication, it seems more and more apparent that being hyper connected is the way to go.

Abbas Haider Ali.