Critical event management (CEM) is software that, when a fire, flood, attack or power outage hits, tells every affected person what to do and then tracks whether each of them is safe. Companies, hospitals, universities and city governments use it. It is sometimes called mass notification software.
The software does three things. First, it knows where people are likely to be. It holds each employee's office, home pin code and phone number, and it can read who is in which building from physical access control. Second, it sends messages on several routes at once: an app notification, an SMS, an email and an automatic voice call. It sends these through messaging and voice APIs (CPaaS) and notification infrastructure, which deliver large numbers of messages to phones within minutes. Third, it collects the replies and shows the security team, on one screen, who is safe, who needs help and who has not replied.
Take, for example, a software company in Chennai with 9,000 employees, during the north-east monsoon. In the evening, the India Meteorological Department issues a red alert for very heavy rain in the city. The company decides to close its two offices the next day. The security team selects every employee who works in those offices or lives in the affected pin codes: 6,400 people. It sends one message: "Offices closed tomorrow. Work from home. Reply 1 if you are safe, 2 if you need help." Within two hours, 6,050 people have replied 1 and 45 have replied 2. The 305 people who have not replied get an automatic voice call. A small help team calls each person who replied 2, and arranges a car or a hotel room for those whose homes are flooded.
The same software starts by itself when other systems raise an alarm. When a fire alarm system raises a full alarm, CEM can send an evacuation message to everyone in that building and track who reaches the assembly point. Serious alerts from video analytics, and threats found by protective intelligence, can start it too. After the event, the record of every message and reply goes to the team that reviews the response, described in incident response and tabletop exercises.
How is CEM different from the public alerts that governments send? A government sends public emergency alerts to every phone in an area, whoever owns it. CEM is run by one organisation, for its own people. It knows who they are, so it can ask each one to reply and follow up with the ones who do not.