I’m not going to rehash the hundreds of stories in the media this week about the first anniversary of Katrina. The Houston Chronicle is full of survival stories, articles about what happened and many other related stories.
What I’d like to concentrate on is disaster preparedness – are we really ready if another disaster like Hurricane Katrina – or even Rita – occurs? Think about it. If a hurricane or other natural/man-made disaster were to happen right now, is your business prepared for a loss in productivity, revenues and personnel? Do you have adequate software and hardware backups or even a hard listing with a phone tree that all employees have on their PDAs and at home?
An interesting phenomenon that is springing up in Houston, and most likely around the country, are businesses that focus on helping companies survive disasters, but more than that, give them the tools to put themselves in a disaster-ready position.
For example, Employee OUTPOST is a Houston-based company specializing in building Web-based communication “outposts” for businesses that are in trouble through a natural of man-made disaster. This site comes from Easterly & Company, the same people who brought us KatrinaPeopleSearch.com (and incidentally, Easterly offers communications and marketing services).
A press release in PDF describes what Employee OUTPOST offers. Especially interesting to me are two of their services: “Employers have the ability to contact employees using blast e-mail by text messaging (SMS)” and Graphical Mapping of employee contacts using Google maps.”
Hmm. Proactive rather than Reactive. Who would have thought this possible?