Why asynchronous communication deserves more consideration in crisis situations

Crisis managers and contingency planners have very different backgrounds. At least in most countries, you cannot study "Crisis Management" and get a "Master in Crisis Management" diploma. Crisis managers backgrounds may vary from military, health care, IT, telecommunications and more exotic ones.
This could be an explanation why in conventional setups command control centers still play a dominant role in crisis management and communication.
But in reality for most crisis types, be it flu pandemic, terrorist threat (or even attack) or floods, the responsible individuals at the political level and the teams at the operational and response levels are quite often mobile professionals that belong to different organisms or administrations. They even may be geographically dislocated.
The common solution proposed to address these problems are telephony and or video conference facilities, allowing people to virtually meet when the crisis happens. These facilities are only a part of the solution because two important aspects are too often ignored:

1. Conference systems are synchronous communication tools that requires people to be available at the same time. The killing argument why this shouldn't be a problem is the following: if there is a crisis, it is the top priority for everybody, so agenda clashed cannot occur and thus are not a problem . This, of course, isn't true. If a major incident or even a catastrophic one (e.g. London bombing) happened, many organizations may be involved at different level, add hoc task groups might be created and most importantly a multitude of measures may be implemented.
   As an example, Luxembourg (the country, not the city) has defined 187 different measures in the context of the flu pandemic risk, of which several might need to be implemented in parallel (c.f. http://www.grippeaviaire.public.lu/mesures/gouv/index.html ). Luxembourg is among the smallest countries in the world, which might reduce the scale of the crisis, but which also increases the chances that the same people are relevant in several contexts.
   
   
2. Even to organize a physical (~synchronous) meeting or a telephony or video conference (~synchronous), you need to call in local participants or notify participants that are on the move or at a remote location my any means. You not only may want to notify them in a fully automated way, but you also may want to know in real time who will be available, to make a proper planning of your crisis management. People may have mobile or fixed phones, instant messaging, e-mail, BlackBerrys or pagers. In these situations asynchronous messaging communication is probably the only rapid and affordable way to get the job done.

When comparing synchronous communication (physical meeting, telephony or video conference) to asynchronous communication, several other aspects may be important:

• intrusiveness, e.g. can a first responder answer to a phone call when he is busy saving lives?
• communication clashes - what happens if I'm involved in more communications or communication threads? Are messages carrying vital information delayed or even lost?
  
• logging and tracing of communications - how can crisis managers extract lessons learned and how can they justify their choices afterwards?

The table below gives the summary of the main differences.


To conclude, in the crisis communication context, an asynchronous messaging system might be an essential complement to the command control conferencing facilities, as it is the only way to efficiently communicate with people relevant to the crisis, but that are on the move, or key persons that have more than one function in the management of the crisis.

Are specialized messaging systems for crisis situations available on the market?
The clear answer is yes!

Who is providing such a solution?
Guess ;-) ? My company:

alarmtilt

But to be fair, there are also other companies, it might be worth to have a look at:
mir3
n3
paradigm
strohl systems

If you find some more solutions to add to the list please write a comment and let us know!