The use of technology for "crisis" management (Kurtis's Blog)

Every now and then it is suggested that technology can be a useful tool for reaching wide audiences in terms of crisis or natural disasters. I think this is a good idea, it's long since the FM radio stations where the most obvious way to reach a large percentage of the population.

I had had the (mis-)fortune to study, what I believe to a somewhat similar event unfold in the last 12 hours. For the weekend, I am planning to go with some of my friends from Verbier to London. Now, as blogged about before, I am therefor of course affected by the SAS strike. While the SAS cabin crew get absolutely now sympathy from me, their poor colleagues at the booking centers do as they are left with trying to clean up the mess left. So yesterday I called SAS to find out what was going to happen. I called at around 8.30 and was advised more information was to be provided at lunch time yesterday - on their web-site. I thought that was a great concept and at 11.53 news where posted that SAS would indeed cancel a large number of flights today. The disturbing thing was that the only mean to fix your ticket was through calling SAS - which I did. Now, I couldn't get through to SAS Sweden, so I called the International booking centre in Denmark. They had no information about the strike but a quick look at their own page told them the same information I had. The friendly lady promised to look into it and call back. Unfortunately I got stuck on the phone, but to my surprise she instead sent me an email with confirmation that I had been rebooked through Oslo to London! Great!!! I was impressed!

At 16.00 SAS even sent out an email, which seems to have been to either everyone with a reservation or all Eurobonus members, I can't tell from the email. I was still pretty happy.

Then I decided to try and check in on-line. It just says I need a paper ticket. I suspected this had to do with the rebooking, and that I got an upgrade to fit in on the plane Oslo-London.

This morning I woke up and realised something funny. At 0.30 I had received an SMS from SAS telling me that there would be a cancelled flight due to the strike. The funny thing is that it appears as if the SMS was sent at 16.00 CET yesterday. Now, my suspicion is that the SAS SMS gateway either could not handle the volume of SMS:es they where sending out, or the SMS got somehow queued at the provider.

Now this highlights part of the problem with how do you do mass notifications to people. SMSing people through the mobile phone network seems like a reasonable idea, but seems poor at doing instant notifications as you most likely will end up with the "New Years eve" syndrome, i.e you just can't get that volume through. Now, I realise that is a very simplified view of how the mobile network works, but it does hold some truth. The Internet and email on the other hand, seems readily made for mass distribution, but has the drawback that short of me and perhaps a handful of others, it is unlikely to work as an immediate notifier. This clearly poses a challenge for crisis management on a national level - in today's world, what do you use for wide spread notification instead of the FM radio? I think there is a lot of work to be done here, and most likely investments that needs to be made in the mobile networks - investments in over capacity that the network operators are unlikely to pay for.

As for my flight ticket, I just got an SMS from SAS saying they had fixed by booking and that I can now check in on the web...

Kurtis's Blog

The use of technology for "crisis" management

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