If You See Something, Say Something

Posted by Dave Burr on February 3, 2018
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The missile alert mishap in Hawaii which occurred in January 2018 taught many lessons. We will touch on a few of them in future articles. We hope that one takeaway is the need for training on the part of people with the capacity to cause mass panic. Sounds pretty obvious, right? Not to everyone. We have been pushing back against the notion, fostered in a few small circles, that each individual employee or participant in an organization have the ability to launch mass alerts.

This really happened: A potential customer, supposedly armed with “consultants” on the conference call, stated, “if an employee sees what he thinks is the barrel of a rifle, he should be able to send that information immediately to all employees.” I suggested that such information should be vetted in order to:

  1. determine what is actually happening
  2. determine what to communicate and to whom in order to get the most positive outcome. Yelling at the top of your lungs isn’t very constructive. It wasn’t in Hawaii

We will be writing more about “active shooter” situations and protocols, which account for a negligible percentage of mass alert applications (and frankly shouldn’t rely so much on various outside networks provided by wireless carriers.)

It’s clear that many people believe that speed is the most important element in employee notification. However, getting proper information to the proper people is what’s important. That responsibility should be given to the few who are trained to do it. The “if you see something” campaign does not suggest at all that each individual should be provided with an air raid siren.

That said, each person SHOULD have the ability to initiate a mass notification. And that starts with each person knowing who to contact and how, with minimal delays. There aren’t that many situations where an employee notification system is used where minutes count. But let’s imagine that they do. Do your employees know to whom to “say something” if they have a concern? Who are the proper point people? Organizations almost always fall down on that basic element. Let’s start there. Once that is done, everything starts falling into place because you can get from information source to properly generated mass alert very quickly.

Mass Notification System Modes

Posted by Dave Burr on November 3, 2017
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A good mass notification system or employee notification system utilizes many modes in an attempt to reach people. AMG Alerts, for example, uses combinations or e-mail, voice, SMS (text), RSS and other modes to maximize the chance of getting out the message.

One thing we have noticed as we assist our customers is , in many cases, a strong belief that land line phones will be a good method of reaching people. They often summarily profile groups – older or lower income or less educated – as technologically challenged and  seed the system with land line phone numbers, figuring that at least they will be able to use land lines in an emergency.

This is a mistake. First, statistics on wireless phone and internet use do not support the theory that, say, person in a lower socioeconomic class or whom is older does not use a wireless phone or does not have email account.

Secondly, the power grid in many parts of the U.S. is very fragile and will be the first thing to go down. But hey, the more resilient land line phone network will probably be available, right? Probably, but guess what? Most people won’t be able to get to it, as barely anyone has an old-fashioned phone line-powered telephone. In the vast majority of our homes, if the power goes out, you’re not going to be picking up your land line phone to inform the power company.

This makes wireless extremely important. Wireless companies do make an effort to keep their networks alive with backup power, which ultimately can make a wireless network more effective as a mass notification mode than the very reliable land line network, which might be operational but barely accessible.

All of this means that if our customer truly wants to reach their recipient base, they should recognize the use of other communication modes among groups that they might otherwise underestimate, and they should vigorously gather and use that information for a more bulletproof notification system.

Employee Notification System Database Planning

Posted by Dave Burr on October 26, 2017
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In a past post we spoke about the value of simplicity in the data structure. Because we see our AMG Alerts customers over-complicating their databases all the time, and it’s been a while, I will touch on this again.

When an organization considers how to split up the population for selective notification (assuming that it’s even necessary), we see evidence the the first question they ask is “How can I split everyone into hierarchies and groups?” There is further evidence that that organizations look to their HRIS database and see how it may be broken out there. But the HRIS is used for a different purpose, so that shouldn’t determine the setup of the notification system.

And unfortunately we also see customers making it as complicated as our system will allow, without regard to whether such minute groupings would ever be used as part of a “response” to a situation.

In mass notification, the “old saying” (the quotes are there because actually we just made this up ourselves) is: “It’s almost always better to inform too many people than too few.” That means that if you break up your database into tiny slivers, your maintenance requirements can grow exponentially. Try not to create a system where just because Joe Tucker is now Salaried instead of Hourly, or he moved from second shift to first shift, he now is not going to get the message because his profile within the notification system hasn’t been updated. Most of the time you can cover subgroups with the message text. Consider blowing away the “shift” subgroup and just send to all Plant employees, “second shift is cancelled tonight.” And there are very few emergencies where you’d send a message to only the people that are Salaried.

Yes, of course there are some good reasons to break up the database. You might need to send sensitive information to the Executive Team that need not be shared with everyone. You might have a very large population and want to minimize messaging costs. Or maybe you send messages so often that you’d get push-back from the “unaffected” portion of the population.

Erring on the side of simplicity, however, is a good policy. Consider REALISTIC scenarios about how you might want to selectively send, and then set up the system that way. Of you start with complexity, the person launching the notification might start using that complexity and you’ll ultimately end up in the “notified ‘too few'” category. If you start with simplicity, you won’t have the “too few” issue problem. You can always break up your database further as you run into realistic scenarios where that is needed.

Text Alert System – Public vs. Private Systems

Posted by Dave Burr on March 29, 2017
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In some of our articles regarding employee notification systems and school notification systems, we mention the benefit of a “private” notification system without much clarification.

There are three basic categories of notification system:

Public: These are the government sponsored programs where federal, state, and sometimes local government works with telephone and wireless companies to provide types of warnings, such as Amber Alerts,  to devices. Normally the operating system allows opt-in or -out of these notifications.

Corporate-sponsored: Most people are familiar with, say, television stations scrolling school and sometimes company closures along the bottom of the screen. While to some degree there is “serving of the public interest”, these are basically marketing programs designed to enhance viewership. Similarly, many media outlets allow you to text a keyword to a short code to receive some sort of alert, often related to weather but other messages could be piggybacked along with those. The business concept behind those offerings is to build awareness of and loyalty to the provider of the messages, and sometimes to sell other goods and services.

Private: These are the mass notification systems that YOU control. Obviously they are essential because while a corporate-sponsored system might alert you to the fact that there is a snowstorm in the area, you need a private system to provide whatever details apply specifically to your organization.  And the fact is that the vast majority of notifications that are sent via a private system like AMG Alerts do not deal specifically with anything weather-related (at least in a macro sense) but instead issues that are unforeseen:  security issues, system failures, and other localized phenomena.

Certainly there is a place for all three layers because they serve different purposes.

 

Employee Notification System – Eyes on the Database!

Posted by Dave Burr on May 4, 2016
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Some of our customers have the goal of automating every process that can possibly be automated. Some of it is based on the good old-fashioned love of technology, and much of it is based on the assumption (often wrong) that automating every task reduces overall costs. With AMG Alerts, we can support a variety of automation. But we don’t always embrace the view that automation is always better.

And of course we always embrace the idea that employees should be able to at least have the opportunity to update their data directly on our system.

Instead of going into the myriad examples of how automation can INCREASE overall cost when you look at the big picture, let’s look at one fundamental thing in the case of notification systems: the ability to use your mass notification system to communicate.

Wholesale replacements of the database, when automated, are extremely dangerous and may leave you looking at a blank contact database an a very inopportune time. Even the safer method, incremental updates, can leave you with missing information at the wrong time.

We encourage our customers, even if they use an automated process to generate the data, to log in and run the updates on our interface so they can take a glance at the results of their changes. Which is worse: 1) Only updating the database once every two weeks (because of the perceived “cost” of logging in more frequently), or 2) trying to issue an emergency notification and noticing that there is missing data and having to deal with that, when you possibly don’t even have access to a critical system to fix the problem?

In the case of #1, worst case, a couple of people might not get the message because their data didn’t get changed. But that ALWAYS happens and has nothing to do with the mass notification system itself. (we have dealt with this in another blog article, and will write more). So ultimately, which would you rather have?

Employee Notification System Data Control

Posted by Dave Burr on March 16, 2016
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There are many ways to populate and manage the data in a well-designed employee notification system. One option is complete internal management, where employees have no access to their contact profiles and the information contained within. The company has an internal system that hopefully has contact information, and they load the data into the notification system. Employees are never provided access to those profiles.

Another is complete external control where employees sign up and then subsequently manage their own profiles on an ongoing basis and the company doesn’t need to do anything in the way of management, other than to cajole the few stragglers. And even that problem solves itself after the first notification where  reticent employees don’t get their notification.

And of course, systems such as AMG Alerts allow for hybrids of these two approaches. Where an initial upload is possible and the employees then are granted access for any change in assumptions or to address wrong or missing information.

Proponents of the complete internal approach usually say things line “we want this data to reside in one place. We can’t let the employee have control because he might change something.(!)” The frequency with which we hear that is alarming and disappointing. It seems that they are missing the ultimate point of the system, which is to effectively communicate in situations that involve safety or at the very least, convenience of their employees. It is not primarily about keeping perfectly aligned databases. That detail may be accomplished at a more leisurely pace because it is NOT critical.

As much as we hear disrespectful talk about employees and their lack of capability and potentially hostile motivations, we question the basis for these thoughts in many cases. You will virtually ALWAYS have a better system – for the purposes of emergency notification – if you involve employees and let them easily change their information and their preferences as they see fit. With AMG Alerts, they just click their own key link to do this. They are more likely to take a second to do that than they are to “contact HR if there are any changes”.  Half of the time, they don’t know if there are any any changes because they aren’t even sure how their profile is set up and what’s in there!

Employee Notification Systems and “Supplier Anonymity”

Posted by Dave Burr on March 10, 2016
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Every one in a while we are asked “does the employee have to know that it is AMG Alerts behind the messaging system, or can we make it appear that it is all our company?”

Transparency is fairly difficult in situations where you are offering portals or various access to the application by employees themselves. But even for companies (our customers) that do not offer any access to profiles, there are still a few issues.

  • Email is more likely to be treated as Spam by various anti-spam programs if the actual Sender is not clear. And in any case, we can’t hide it simply by doing an “on behalf of”, so why even take the risk when the idea is to get the message to the recipient? Proper identification of the Sender is also important so that employees can whitelist right right address(es).
  • On a regular basis, we get contacted by our customers’ employees telling us that they are in the wrong group or wrong company or that their contact information needs to be updated. We are really the only ones visible in some setups. Mass notification system suppliers such as AMG Alerts are ultimately partners in the process, or should be. By the way, the situation where an employee comes to the supplier is one of the many downsides of complete internal management of the database, and this will be covered in a future blog article.
  • Third is the business consideration. Customers actually present considerable risk to mass notification companies because in almost every case, the company do not monitor message content or recipient data – at least in real time. This means that their various supplier and carriers can shut them down, or they may have legal exposure, because of a single rogue customer. Having just enough visibility to give a recipient a place to complain protects the business, which of course protects ALL of the customers.

 

 

Mass Notification System Opt-In/Out for SMS

Posted by Dave Burr on October 16, 2015
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While it may seem straightforward, the issue of opt-in and opt-out in Employee Notification System or Mass Notification System applications can be a tricky one.

First, there is the basic issue of including opt-out information on every outbound text, as good practice usually dictates. In the real world, the recipient should have already received opt-out instructions and sometimes that precious character space in the limited SMS world could be used for the urgent message.

This begs a solution that should include an opt-in or some other on-boarding process for employees, students, residents, or other group that includes clear communications about what types of message they will receive and how to opt out. With our broad base of AMG Alerts customers, we have seen many instances where this might not be happening. Rather than using the external portals that we provide, which provide these instructions (as well as, obviously, the “opt-in”), our customer is uploading data that may not be current, and worse, the use of the system my be different than what might have been specifically “contracted for” by the recipient, as ownership of the alerts program has changed.

We counter this by being up front with our identity on all messages, regardless of mode, as the mass notification system provider and we make sure our customers do the same in terms of their identities. This way, a recipient always has somewhere to go even if they do not follow one of the opt-out processes that we provide.

In fact, our system is “email-based” to a large degree, meaning that we get emails for most people regardless of the mode used for alerts. This is so that our system can be used, by our customer, outside the normal process to directly ASK recipients if they still want to be included in the program and provide an opt-out link. This functionality is handy when the database has been allowed to get “stale” and/or the purpose of the system has changed.

At the end of the day, we have to be ultra-sensitive to SMS “spam” concerns because as bad as e-mail is, at least we have tools to fight it. People see unwanted SMS messages as a real violation, so we always encourage our customers to only upload and use SMS information if they have recent permission for it to be used with their purpose in mind and communicate that it’s coming. Otherwise, use the opt-in/modification portals so that the recipient has control initially and on an ongoing basis.

Employee Notification System – “Cascading” vs. “Blast” Systems

Posted by Dave Burr on September 23, 2015
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While it is generally the most cost efficient to send one notification to the recipient in the manner in which he or she has indicated would be most effective, some situations might call for a more aggressive approach in which several modes are used. There are a couple of ways to do this:

  1. via “Cascading” attempts, wherein an SMS is sent, for example, and then after some designated period of time if there is no reply, a voice to a land line might be attempted. Then after some period of time (delay), another mode might be attempted if there is no reply
  2. via “Blast”, wherein all the modes are attempted immediately

With AMG Alerts, we take the Blast approach because we consider it superior for several reasons:

  • A Cascading model has delays built into the process, presumably so that no more modes will be used than necessary. This COULD have capacity benefits for the mass notification supplier (or could cost them in capacity if they don’t make the “delay” long enough. )It could have cost benefits for the end users. depending on the pricing model. But if a message is important enough to be launched multi-mode, why introduce these delays just to save a few dollars? Just send it out all at once.
  • In 99% of the situations that we see, notification messages don’t require a response, and without that, a cascading system can’t work! You couldn’t just use the simple fact that a voicemail was left or an SMS  message was delivered as confirmation that you don’t need to move to the next mode

Mass Notification System Data Automation

Posted by Dave Burr on August 24, 2015
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Several mass notifications systems, such as AMG Alerts, have tools to allow recipients to add or at least manage their own profiles in order that the system is independent from other systems within the customer’s organization. The primary reason for this, surprising to many, is not technical but instead, the benefit of short implementation time. Many trying to implement an employee notification system or a school alert system want the solution NOW.

Often, as time goes by, people as us to do integration with their current system. While we do not want this to become a technical article any more than it is (or will be) , we generally recommend “batch” updates for the sake of practicality.  And with the added reason of security, neither our customers nor us seriously consider any type of real-time interactions between our two information databases. The batch concept works.

And since we are automating here and have, usually, no human babysitter, we also recommend to our customers incremental updates. This means that we get the ADDs and deal with those and we get the DELETES and deal with those.  Such a process is far less dangerous because the unchanged records, which represent 95+% of the database, can sit there safely without being subject to being wiped out when, say, whole data sets are replaced but the source that our customer provides contains no records due to an automation hiccup.

There are other good reasons for this design and we always work closely with our customers to design an efficient overall process and then work automation based on that.