CTO Blog
I guess if you wanted to take an example of an area in which extensive investments had been made to get communication of factual information right then the government emergency services would probably be a good case.
Yet when an actual emergency occurs then reality is that thousands of people who are involved using Web 2.0 technologies can do a better job of collecting, collating and informing each other than a conventional centralised emergency system.
Yup I mean the catastrophic Californian fire emergency, and for a quick overview on how citizens have been using Web 2.0 then take a look at this link.
One of the surprising examples of this is the Los Angeles Fire Depot using Twitter to broadcast out messages of accidents, fire breakouts, etc., but how does this come about? My own experience of looking into examples like this is that if this idea was formally proposed when there wasn’t a problem then the management would probably reject it as unnecessary and not ‘industrial strength’. However there comes a moment when the issues and problems become serious enough that ideas to ‘save the day’ are called for.
At this point a younger member of staff comes up with the idea of using Twitter, or whatever, and shows how to set this up quickly and immediately, and a grateful management except the capability.
It would be nice to think that this could happen without having to have such an appalling emergency to drive managers towards adopting new technology.
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
Thanks Andy, I hadn’t picked up on this fascinating use for Twitter. However, it did occur to me to ask why you were not using it during your conference(?) in Oslo. I have benefitted greatly from the tweets of attendees at conferences, to the extent that it is my near-real-time newsfeed from such events.
I live in the So Cal Fire area and guess what – twitter feeds are the things I rely to make my next decision as to Fire movements
Thats great if the electricity grid is still intact. For most major emergencies this probably will not be the case. Mobile networks and electrical were the first to go in Katrina. The “reverse 911″ system they just put in place using the plain old telephone also seemed to help out a lot too.
The point about mobile/cell phone networks failing early in an emergency situation is a good one and it happened to me in London when we had the underground / bus bombing some years ago.
on the other hand i had a different view on the topic yesterday at a Dutch emergency forces conference. they suggested that centralised single point of failure was more vunerable than distributed methods.
interesting arguement as to whether the telecoms providers will create resilience more successfully than the public sectors systems.