Carie417's blog

Is efficiency making us vulnerable?

Art Botterell, community warning systems manager for the Office of the Sheriff in Contra Costa County, Calif., warned that it may be.

During his presentation, “A Shifting Landscape: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities,” he argued that an institutional culture that rewards efficiency may be opening the door to catastrophic instances, eliminating organizational flexibility and “trimming the fat” before a cold winter sets in. Instead, he suggested that campuses should move away from a “monoculture” approach with technology to a process for cultivating rich technologies. It’s not, for instance, about delivering warnings from the same system. But accessing all warning notification systems from a single interface.  

This approach, he said, may “future proof” processes and open the door to greater diversity and competition.

He also offered his own “Five Simple Rules” for emergency management:

As the second day gets underway at the EDUCAUSE Summit on campus security and emergency management, many lingering questions from the first day still remain, demonstrating the complexity of the problem at hand. While sharing insights at the close of Monday’s sessions, participants continued to comment on the need for greater information sharing and collaboration across institutions. “We have similar needs yet individual solutions,” one participant said, noting that campuses tend to develop their own solutions instead of leverage the wider community’s expertise. Universities need a way to share their needs so that their peers can see them and say, “We’re already working on it.”

After focusing on challenges for much of the early afternoon, the focus has shifted at the EDUCAUSE Summit from identifying issues to sharing solutions.  Participants have offered innovations from their own campuses, most focusing on emergency notification  and communication systems (sirens, text messaging, digital signage) or campus monitoring. There are examples of data protection and coalition building (particularly in breaking down communication walls between campuses and emergency responders), and a few that focus on disaster education. Very few, however, address one of the primary issues that the group identified in earlier sessions: that students, faculty and staff aren’t creating a culture built around safety and preparedness, with an emphasis on training and prevention.

From the initial list of innovations – more than 40 total – the group selected six innovations for a “lightning round” of presentations. (A complete list will be compiled from the Summit and available at a later date.) These “solutions in focus” are a snapshot of the ideas presented:

It’s often easy to think of large-scale, headline grabbing disasters and emergencies when discussing emergency preparedness. Yet, as participants at the EDUCAUSE Summit on “The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management,” sit down with one another, it becomes clear that hazards can be found across the spectrum. When prompted to discuss “challenges” to emergency response and preparedness on their campus, participants, inevitably, use examples from their own experiences. Students hear about a threat and fail to report it to the correct authorities. A tragedy occurs and other students, ignoring the danger, participate in the same risky behavior. Or community members react in counterproductive ways to alert systems. It’s clear that the risk cuts across campuses regardless of size, location or classification.

With that in mind, the group devised a list of common challenges for creating safe campuses and well-executed emergency response plans. They focused on those local challenges at their institutions and then larger, more national issues.

After brief introductions, participants in the EDUCAUSE Summit, “The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management,” began working in small groups, imagining the “hallmarks” of an effectively managed disaster and a 100 percent safe campus.

They came back together, as a larger group, to share their lists. Among the top characteristics of an effectively managed disaster:

• As a guiding principle: Prevention, Detection, Recovery
• Effective, useful, and appropriate communications
• Minimizing Losses
• Smooth transitions from emergency environment to normal status and vice versa
• Speed of execution
• Key actors understood and performed their roles as expected (Able to adapt as situation evolves)
• All the technology worked
• No turf wars, jurisdiction understood
• Unified leadership
• “Playbook” (manual of emergency procedures and processes) up to date and available
• Practice made perfect

And a campus that’s 100 percent safe:

As participants at the EDUCAUSE Summit, "The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management," begin to work together to describe the hallmarks of an effectively managed disaster and a 100 percent safe campus today, it's become clear just how many layers the issue may entail.

As they discuss, groups are struck by the conflict between fostering openness and access on campus while managing risk and mantaining safety. In screening applicants and employees while offering fair and open opportunities. Identity management and personal privacy. Or the difference betwen "intrusive" policies and fostering a culture on campus where each individual cultivates a healthy respect for their safety and the safety of others.

Groups are also finding that the individual "hallmarks" can not be summed up in single-word answers. Instead, words like “communication” or “community” must be peeled back. What does effective communication entail? And, more so, who are the important groups? Internal leadership? Emergency groups? People on campus? The larger community? And how do campuses manage each constituency group?

“If we shake hands before a disaster we won’t have to point fingers afterwards.”

-          International Association of Emergency Managers, September 2007

With an image of an earthquake’s path on the screen, EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger set the stage for the 2008 EDUCAUSE Summit, “The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management” by ticking off many of the hazards that colleges and universities have faced in recent years. Noting their unpredictability – and their apparent frequency – she suggested that the most powerful tool for moving forward may collaborations like those she hopes will take place in Washington this week.  

Collaboration was a prevalent theme during the Summit’s opening remarks, echoed by NACUBO project director and principal investigator Jim Hyatt, who introduced participants to a multi-association, five-phase project designed to address those threats faced by colleges and universities while helping campuses assess their own emergency preparedness.

Colleges and universities are subject to all-hazards, ranging from natural disasters to man-made events.  Recent shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, coupled with the devastation of floods and hurricanes and the threat of domestic and international terrorism have created a new sense of urgency on our campuses as we continue to explore new practices and policies for security and emergency management, from preparedness through recovery. 

In February, EDUCAUSE joined NACUBO and several other higher education associations to launch a new initiative aimed at helping institutions of higher education to develop comprehensive, all-hazards emergency management plans. This month, EDUCAUSE will bring together campus and IT leaders to continue the dialogue.

This one-hour podcast entitled, "Net Generation Students and Campus IT: Supporting Student Success in the Age of Multitasking, Facebooking, and Instant Messaging," was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference. Moderated by Jeanna Mastrodicasa, co-author of Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know about Today’s Students, this panel discussion features students Olivia White, Agnes Scott College, Joan Collier, Georgia State University, Chris Davis, Georgia Perimeter College, Irakli Gabruashvili, Georgia State University, and Anu Parvativar, Georgia Institute of Technology. They share candid advice for higher education, from the reality of file sharing and laptops in the classroom to their distaste for textbook prices and faculty Facebook friends.

This one-hour podcast was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference. This keynote panel discussion, entitled “Weathering the Storm – Preparing for, Responding to, and Recovering from Emergencies,” features Betty Hawkins, program manager at the University of South Carolina, David Sliman, directory of technology at the University of Southern Mississippi, and Frank O’Quinn, deputy policy and IT disaster recovery officer at Louisiana State University. Using examples from their own institutional experiences, they share real advice for emergency preparedness and response, answering the question, “How can we plan and prepare in a way that is realistic and meaningful?”

The opening keynote speech at the 2007 Educause Policy Conference was delivered by Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Through public policy debate, forums, and publications, the Cato Institute strives to broaden public access to government policy with particular emphasis on the role of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets. This speech, entitled "Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood", uses the REAL ID Act as a springboard for discussion about the need for competitive, responsive identification that protects individual privacy and civil liberties. This podcast has a runtime of approximately 40 minutes.

In this 30-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Marjorie Hassen in a session entitled Content Recruitment and Development: A Proactive Approach to Building an Institutional Repository. Hassen explains  Penn Library's model for administrating the University of Pennsylvania institutional repository, ScholarlyCommons@Penn.

In this 40-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Kathryn Gates, Jie Tang and Anil Vinjamur in a session entitled Classroom Technology Standards and Design Made Simple. They share analysis of Portland Community College's five-year project to deploy standardized classroom technology tools on four campuses in Portland, Oregon.

In this 41-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Robert O'Leary and Nick Pavlakos in a session entitled Offshoring: Bringing Business Value to Stanford University. They discuss a partnership with an offshore vendor to bring predictability and lower costs to Stanford University's administrative systems development and support functions.

In this 42-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from John Walsh and Jennifer Foutty in a session entitled Community Source Procurement System.They discuss the implementation of the first module of a collaborative, community source financial system and the project's key successes and challenges.