Sounding the alarm

The tragic shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in April was only the most recent, but perhaps most poignant, proof of the need to communicate emergency alerts and instructions to thousands of people simultaneously. In the aftermath, government agencies have been taking a hard look at emergency notification systems that automate the process. Mass notification and alerting has other critical uses. The Air Force Reserve Command, for example, will use AtHoc’s IWSAlerts to recall, within four hours, 30,000 reserve personnel when orders come down, using automated, text-to-speech voice mail. It replaces a phone-tree system that is a manual process. Other government and vendor sources say many agencies still use phone trees to alert first responders.
(Government Computer News special report: Emergency notification systems come in variety of forms; Emergency notification products and vendors; RFP checklist for emergency notification systems)