November 20 2015

Emergency Communications

Recap of CG meeting in Indianapolis, led by Rob Caffey: relatively well attended; brief slide show outlining what we do at Kansas State, including Governance Structure and related departments. Open discussion about variety of solutions. Blackboard, Alertus, Rave Technologies. Slides attached (see link at bottom of page)

What solutions are in place on your campus for emergency communications?

    • Miami U in Ohio - E2Campus text messaging and email alerts; tied into voice phone system so emergency messages come up on phone screen and digital signage. Test twice a year, good results - people get messages quickly. (Benchmarks? perhaps tracked by university response team, not known in IT Comms)

    • Toronto - BBConnect, Alertus. As long as data are delivered via American services (Office 365, Gmail) seem to go quickly, but internal services seem to have some delays. Also use classroom network, publish message to 300 teaching stations via Crestron around campus.

    • NC State - Alertus, up to 15-20 minutes to deliver 40,000 SMS messages, experiencing a long tail (bulk is delivered quickly, but lingering). Can take up to 1 hour to deliver email to 50,000 addresses. Also have Audible alerts (loud speakers/beacons outside). See link: https://www.ncsu.edu/emergency-information/

What is adequate deliver?

    • Email delivery delays also discussed at CG meeting in Indianapolis. Text is considered best, most rapid with email as backup delivery channel.

    • Look at the 90% rule - how long did it take to get the first 90% of the messages out? That is a good rule of thumb. If you can get (K State tracking goal: 90% in first 2 minutes, 95%, 100% may not be possible, may get stuck at 99.9%)

Governance

    • LSU - Emergency Operations Center - student health is head, risk management, police, university communications, facilities and IT are on committee. IT helped select technology and provides support role. Head of EOC has to approve messages.

    • K State - Police makes call when to send a message.

    • Miami - coordinated out of President's office but coordinated with Police, regional campus representatives, Public Affairs, Student Affairs, etc.

When to use?

    • Lot of thunder storms in Kansas, do we sent out SMS and voice every time there is a severe storm. People complained and based on those complaints, we researched with community. For example, we survey our students twice a year, after each test (spring, fall). Did it work for you, did you get the message? Compare to reports from our aggregator that sends out the message. Another item, leadership thought we should send out "not closed" message. Community members upset when they get 5AM update saying "come to campus today" - they only want the "don't come" not the business as usual messages.

    • Miami - stingy when we use the system, particularly for campus closures, i.e. snowing to the point where we close campus. Used last week for an unfortunate highway construction-related that affected our fiber ring for Internet. 6 foot chunk of cable cut out. Could use internal email, but not connect off campus or external addresses, sites.

    • LSU - we use only for life-threatening, life endangering incidents. Also used for criminal-related incidents.

    • Rice - similar to LSU's use.

    • Toronto - mass communications as well as emergency communications - rolled out for emergency first, then create descriptions of other acceptable use cases. Another example: "Union postal workers on strike, but you are able to cross picket lines" may go to rest of campus but not to the members of that specific union (union rules). Grouping is coming right out of HR system (faculty, campus, course, etc. via Blackboard).

Who on your campus is involved in distribution of emergency communications? May have evolved over last 7 years.

    • Discovered that when the process was owned by IT, didn't get buy-in or go as well as hoped. When Public Affairs becomes the owner, much better embraced by campus.

Environment, communications for closure?

    • See Washington College article below.

    • NC State and Rice took note after Hurricane Katrina and set up plan to be able to continue courses if students were unable to attend classes due to isolation (Bird Flu, Swine Flu, weather or violence-threat-related closures)

    • At what point does Emergency Communications begin to evolve into business continuity.

Additional information vs the full story? How do you balance the heads up message versus the details?

    • K State - text message is heads up with link to details (web, email)

    • Further updates are posted to web (home) page and not send out additional updates - when/what alerts and updates are coordinated between Public Relations and Police.

    • NC State - sometimes message refer to home page before the home page (University Communications controlled) is updated. Variety of reasons why (not have full story, individual editors not online)

    • Toronto Use Alertus RSS feeds for immediate invocation of overriding home page (with RSS link) to direct to the RSS link.

    • Miami - similar in that university's home page is linked to Emergency Communications. Coordination of both emergency communications and home page in same office.

    • Wisconsin - work into procedure that whatever message refers to, that link (home page or social) is valid and up to date.

Are you testing for number of hits to your home page?

    • Rice - for weather-related home page dropped, we have an off-site business continuity "emergency home page" that will pop up. LSU asked what if the home page goes dark for another reason? Carlyn not sure what time or action prompts the load of the emergency page.

    • What if you just host your whole university web site in the cloud?

    • Miami - have back up site, off-site.

    • NC State - local provider (research network) for back up emergency.

    • Yale - moved entire ITS web site to Acquia cloud (Drupal campus). Aquia is part of Amazon backbone, also www.yale.edu is there. Pilot project of 50 university web sites going up to Acquia this year, move the rest (800+ sites) next year. Still have a locally hosted version of site (weekly backup) but believe the likelihood of Acquia going down is far less than disruption on our local host.

Do you have a set of procedures for notifying your campus in descending order (communicating up, down, laterally) when you have an IT Crisis? What is the choreography?

    • LSU - IT Communications leader is the bearer of bad news to the CIO, even at 3AM. Network operations send update to Comms person, then they begin working on the problem. Assessments every 10 minutes. Determine how many people Comms person will wake up. Note: when things go terribly wrong,

    • Miami - Similar to LSU, base notification decisions on time of day and number impacted.

    • Rice - internal IT only channel (Canary@) for employees to send "I smell smoke" messages

    • Miami - have an internal chat channel similar to Rice.

Recent resources, references:

Previous resources, references: