Crisis Communication Is Turning To IT Solutions

By Ally Kutz, contributing writer

The crisis communication IT market could grow this year, according to an article for Federal News Radio by CTO and co-founder of AtHoc Aviv Seigel. The article includes his predictions for crisis communication in 2015.

According to Seigel, federal organizations will be turning to advanced solutions for crisis communication due to factors including the increase in political and social environments that create more life-threatening events, more serious consequences of those events, geographical dispersion of organizations, and an increase in workplace violence.

He predicts new platforms will be unified, and will integrate with legacy systems for crisis communications. Solutions will tie together technologies including mobile phones, tablets, wearables, and laptops, with desktop computers, unified communication, two-way radios, sirens, public announcement systems, video cameras, access controls, integrated public alert and warning systems (IPAWS) and social network notification.

According to Seigel, cybersecurity and privacy protection platforms will offer multiple options for securing data, such as on-premises, cloud, or hybrid. Personnel accountability (PA) will play a huge role as well, with system implementation to assist in the tracking of staff in order to ensure location and readiness for response.

He also stresses the importance of connected communications solutions that enable agencies to communicate with enterprises, organizations, and others in the community —and helps them to share information with others.

It is important, however, for you to help your clients avoid what Eric Holdeman calls in Emergency Management the “technology trap. He defines this as “making the tech too complicated and all encompassing.” If it’s not easy for end users, they only will use a portion of what the system can do —and only a portion of what the agency paid for.

To IT solutions providers, Holdeman suggests, “Just develop a new single-focused application that accomplishes the task and don’t try to build it into a monolithic system that tries to do too much … don’t keep expanding what was a good idea to become something that people have trouble navigating and operating within.”