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Opinion

Voices from the Sky: The Technology Is the Easy Part

5/3/2007

By Terry Calhoun

After 9/11 and Katrina, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the American Council on Education (ACE) received funding from TIAA-CREF to create the Campus Relief website. It is intended to be "a resource for institutions, students, faculty, and staff to aid in the recovery from these ... disasters."

Unfortunately, and this is not a criticism of the Campus Relief website--I'm really glad that this resource is there because there will come a time when it is needed--the Virginia Tech shootings were not the kind of crisis that it was designed for. Not only was there very limited physical damage, but Virginia Tech proved very capable of providing much of what it needed in the aftermath. Its staff did, and continues to do, an excellent job.

Does every higher education institution need an instantaneous communications system to reach out to students, faculty, staff, and possibly neighbors? I don't know the answer, but I doubt it. Should we spend a lot of money cobbling together whatever we can from the current state of the art of related technology, when things are changing so rapidly in communications technology that we don't really know for sure what kinds of devices our constituents will be using in five years? I doubt it.

Should we be looking at systemic communications systems that serve a whole lot of other needs and maybe handle the crisis communications thing as part of an entire package? Yes, probably. We do have communications issues: keeping track of students' phone numbers when they are not the ones we issue them, keeping track of students' e-mail addresses when we know that many of them only occasionally check in with the official ones we provide them with; these are day to day issues with registration, tuition, and business continuity implications for the institutions that are for certain going to happen every single day.

The Systems You Already Have
Now, what about the system you might already have in place on campus? It could be that the already-installed sound warning system you have can be a whole lot more flexible than you thought. On the EDUCAUSE CIO Constituency Group's e-mail list recently, a number of those posting revealed they had discovered just such untapped flexibility in systems on their campus.

One southern campus has taken a close look at the very loud PA system in its football stadium, which happens to be right in central campus anyway, and at the sound system in its "memorial tower." (The latter sound system has been "turned down" for years because it has such a loud capacity.

On another campus, the IT staff discovered, when they inquired, that the current fire alarm system creates "bell" sounds using capabilities that also let it broadcast voice messages. A Midwestern school discovered, when they looked, that the tornado alarm system they have in place can broadcast voice instead of sirens. That CIO was looking forward to how people would react to invisible loud voices from the sky when they ran their first tests.

Obviously, other campuses, especially state schools and especially community colleges, are embedded in wider communications alarm systems where they'll simply benefit from what the larger state or local organization is doing.

But once the technology is in place, the hard part will remain: How do you know when to alarm people, and how do you know what to tell them to do? That's where the humans come in. (And, unfortunately, the lawyers who are, yes, I know, by and large, human too.)

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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