Alerting has been a core communications service since a little after the first day phones were invented. We've all heard about the first call: "Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you!" (Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can see it in Edison's own writing : Click here.) For a while they continued to license phones in pairs so you were directly connected to the person you wanted to talk with, just like Bell and Watson. And to get their attention you'd shout into the phone or tap on it. Thankfully, though, a bell got added to these things pretty soon, and the whole system was re-designed to get reliable bell alerting - the foundation for Notification.
Notification services today go well beyond just ringing. There's horn-blaring, for example. Until recently that's how they contacted fire fighters here where I live. In a small community when you have no idea where the helpers are nor how to get in touch with them, blaring a huge loud horn can save the day.
To let lots of people know immediately that something's happening (e.g, a large wave is heading in to shore), you'd like a system that can quickly contact everyone who might be affected. A horn could do the trick if it was located in the right spot. But horns aren't ubiquitous, and it's most important to first get to folks who will be closest to the trouble. Here's a screen shot from GeoComm's Geolynx (a system that sits at the core of many 9-1-1 installations) showing how an agent can use a map to point to a danger zone and set a priority for who should be called first, second, etc
Any single method for getting a person's attention is just a little less than perfect. Calling their phone is an option, but how often is someone reach-able by a specific number? SMS Texting can be a more dependable way to reach them since the receiver is so easy to carry, until the battery goes down or you lose it. I can go on-and-on ... two-way radios, IM, WiFi phones, etc etc... There are so many ways we're connected, but using these things that reaching the right person in the right way for an emergency is a complicated problem.
At a minimum you'd like to have a couple of ways to contact someone - giving a fallback if the first approach fails. Everybody has a different preference. Phone and IM would be my top two choices while another person may want just want the big loud horn and maybe a doorbell.
When you need a specialist to work an issue right away, there are several factors in deciding who to call. If an emergency happened in a remote place, perhaps the right thing to do is to find someone who can get there quickly instead of finding the smartest expert. For example, before finding a cardiologist who can get to a tiny town, you'd hope that they find the closest rural doctor who can get there in a hurry. So, location information, expertise, and availability all come into play in deciding who to notify. And when the person you're trying to reach isn't instantly reachable, you'd want a contingency list so you can get in touch with the next best person.
If you just blare a horn or even just an automated dial-out with a message, you don't know whether the info was received. You'd want to know if someone heard the message (a real person - not an answering machine) and you'd also want to know whether the expert is going to do anything. If it's that rural doctor, you'd like to know roughly when they will be able to get out to the injured party, for example. If it's complicated, you'd probably want to get that rural doctor on a call with the EMT, maybe the cardiologist, and perhaps the E911 dispatcher as well - an instant conference call.
This all leads to a sophisticated layer of automation. In techno-nerdy terms, I'd like a single connected session for my incident - one that brought together whatever information was available with communications among the folks working on the incident and allowed an unambiguous response if needed.
Technology supporting these scenarios has been getting increasingly sophisticated. SIP, Session Initiation Protocol, is one of those hidden technologies that normal people don't need to know about but changes the way things work under the covers. It's a simple but rich way for computer systems to talk and to bring all kinds of things together into a single communications session. Kind of like today's web pages today have text, video, audio, and other things - with SIP, a phone call can have lots of affiliated stuff as well. To help with Notification Services, SIP permits context to be sent along with the call. So alerting via SIP is not just about ringing ... it becomes a solution - a workflow with connected information.
This gives a small flavor for what Avaya's Notification Solution offers. A new addition to our portfolio last year, it gives the flexibility to manage the communications for a 9-1-1 system but can also sit within an enterprise and tie communications into a static workflow - getting the right expert on the right call to solve any problem. It connects to IM, social networks, SMS, VoIP, telephones, and on and on and on. Allowing the right connection to the right person at the right time.
Posted 30 Jun 2010 at 07:49 AM