As an organisation, we are accustomed to being at the heart of a crisis. It is our business to help bring order to chaos. Under normal circumstances our solutions are used to help companies, local authorities, governments even, to manage the full life cycle of a critical event. It could be an extreme weather incident, a power outage or a terrorist attack – we were founded in the aftermath of 9/11 – but our aim is always to facilitate communications that allow risks to be assessed, contact to be made to all those affected, standard operating procedures to be automated and then finally, analysis, which will identify improvements for next time.
We are continuing to do exactly that for our customers right now, all over the world, but on a considerably greater scale. In recent weeks we have deployed over 106 million coronavirus communications and there is no let-up in demand for how best to manage the impact.
Acting With Speed
What has become clear from the outbreak of coronavirus is just how quickly businesses need to react in order to mitigate the risks of a pandemic to their employees, assets, supply chains and their own brand. Dealing with the process successfully, particularly for organisations with offices across the world, means being aware of real-time updates and bulletins, airport closures, transportation delays, movement restrictions, and manufacturing disruptions.
The Role Of Technology
Being one step ahead is what organisations are striving for, and for those that are well-prepared, technology is playing a vital role. Our own Critical Event Management (CEM) platform, for example, is being leveraged to deliver a range of resources for tracking coronavirus developments. It collates intelligence from thousands of verified data sources reviewed by experienced analysts to create a continually updated stream of validated information. This is integrated into the platform so security, business continuity, emergency management, and supply chain teams can visually see how new developments may impact their business and automate their response and standard operating procedures to help reduce risks.
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Regardless of the industry, or the nature of a business’s operations, we always recommend taking a four-phase approach to a critical event, and the coronavirus crisis is no different:
- Phase 1 – Visualise And Assess – Aggregate situational intelligence by collecting information from all the relevant data sources, and there are many relating to coronavirus, and consolidate it to generate a unified view of the entire incident across all relevant territories.
- Phase 2 – Locate – Depending on where they are located employees are at considerable risk of exposure, particularly since coronavirus is spreading quickly. Businesses can cross-reference the known areas of the virus’ presence with employee travel itineraries or static office assignments and in addition consider anyone with a compromised immune system. Our platform has the ability to dynamically locate people using multiple methods so that any threat to them is based on their needs and actual location.
- Phase 3 – Act & Communicate – Once the situation has been assessed and those at risk located, action can be taken to manage and mitigate the emergency. By leveraging an integrated system, response processes can be pre-defined by those in charge via the platform and decisions made about whether communications are restricted just to employees, or also to partners and customers. Effective communication will keep people safe and avert unnecessary risk. Messages should be short, concise, practical and actionable, and delivered to the maximum number of people by text or phone (voice) giving information about what to do, and asking them to respond to ensure the message has been received.
- Phase 4 – Analyse – When the coronavirus incident has been resolved, organisations will need to analyse their responses. This will provide the vital insight necessary to learn from the incident and improve response times and resourcing for future events.
The threat landscape changes daily as new cases emerge and fatalities increase. The focus for businesses is to gain the best visibility they can over how this unfolding emergency will affect them and plan accordingly. Access to technology that provides a common operating environment can help to break down siloes of information, but perhaps more importantly, right now, it can encourage a unified organisational response – it’s hard to remember a time in our living memories where this was needed more.
About The Author
Javier Colado is Senior Vice President of International Sales at Everbridge. He is responsible for driving Everbridge’s presence and growing revenues in international markets.
Over the course of his career, Javier has led international growth in EMEA and Asia Pacific at organizations such as Intralinks, SAP, Novell and McAfee. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President, EMEA at Intralinks. Previous roles include leadership positions such as Head of Global Sales at Novell, where he had direct responsibility for over $1 billion in annual revenues. Javier is based out of the company’s EMEA headquarters in London.
Javier is a graduate in Telecom Engineering from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, and he has also had extensive executive and management training at both the IESE Business School in Spain and the Harvard Business School.
