* Mass notification systems can save lives
I’m reluctant to write about last week’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech for fear of being viewed as exploiting a tragedy, but I think the topic of emergency notification in the context of how it might have lessened this tragedy is worth the risk.
Last week’s events underscore the importance of information and the timeliness of its delivery. I’m not about to assign blame to any of the school’s officials or law enforcement since, as of this writing, there is so little information available about what actually went on and the timeline of events. However, one thing that is clear so early after the tragedy is that many students and faculty were completely unaware of the first shooting that took place approximately two hours before the bulk of the victims were killed and wounded.
As I’ve discussed in this column before, there is real value in a mass notification system that can notify large numbers of people about an event and that can solicit feedback from them. Such systems – such as those offered by 3n, MessageOne and Amcom Software, among others – could have notified all 26,000 individuals connected with the campus in a short amount of time via their cell phone, e-mail, land line, etc. The system could have told people to stay at home or in their dorms and could have solicited feedback about their status. Such a system could have been deployed for under $100,000 at Virginia Tech.
Should the university — or, for that matter, every university — have such a system? My answer is an emphatic ‘yes.’ While the cost of this system or any other mass notification capability is not trivial, consider the decision from two perspectives. First, and obviously most important, is the fact that fewer people might have died if they had known about the initial shooting. Second, from just a dollar and cents perspective, the university’s cost of mass notification for the next 50 years would have been just a fraction of the amount that it or its insurance company will spend on the lawsuits that will inevitably follow this tragedy.
The bottom line is that mass notification can save lives.
