Think Tank

Computerworld - On-the-Fly Crisis Management

There's police tape across the front of your headquarters one morning because suspicious white powder was found inside. Do your employees know what to do? What if you can't reach key decision-makers? Who's next in line with the authority to give orders? Who has the right skills to deal with this particular crisis?

Companies may have standard disaster-recovery plans, but they rarely have a process for ad hoc crisis management, says Roberto Evaristo, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He uses the analogy that SWAT teams have standard practices for hostage situations, but they also have skills to draw upon in new, unpredictable situations. Evaristo and collaborators Kevin Desouza and Tobin Hensgen are writing a book and consulting on the topic of "adaptive crisis management."

The No.1 problem is the communications breakdown that occurs when decision-makers are unavailable in the first few minutes or hours of a crisis, Evaristo says. He says the IT department could help by setting up systems that can be used to find and reach key people and identify employees who have critical skills, perhaps through wireless access to an expert database.

Most big companies have emergency "call trees" for contacting employees, but they're inefficient and fail if a person in the middle is unreachable, adds Tim DeLisle, a consultant at Corigelan LLC in Chicago. He suggests automating the process by using a service like the one offered by National Notification Network LLC in Glendale, Calif.

Best Bits

The most useful parts of recent IT and business management books.

The Book: Offshore Outsourcing: Business Models, ROI and Best Practices, by Marcia Robinson and Ravi Kalakota (Mivar Press Inc., 2004).

You'll find a basic, albeit rosy, overview of offshore outsourcing in this book. The costs, benefits, examples and country profiles that you'd expect are all covered here. The authors are in the "offshoring is inevitable" camp and argue that the ability to manage offshore outsourcing is a "competency" that all companies will need in order to be competitive.

But there are frighteningly few recommendations for managing the risks and the downsides of offshoring. You won't read about the political backlash, U.S. layoffs or challenges such as security and privacy. There's a brief mention of how Dell Inc. had to yank its corporate tech-support operation from India because of customer complaints about poor communication . But the authors conclude that Dell just needs to work on "providing more accent neutralization, employee training and service quality management" in Bangalore to fix the problem.