Deloitte, the business advisory firm, has developed a new smartphone application, Bamboo, to help businesses handle disasters and crises. The new application is the first one of its kind in this field and is not reliant on mobile network connectivity to work.

The smartphone application stores up-to-date disaster management procedures and action-plans in an interactive and user friendly way on employees’ mobile devices, such as the Blackberry or iPhone.

Bamboo provides:

• Convenient access to your organisation’s crisis management, business continuity or IT disaster recovery plan, when you need it most
• Access to latest contact details by integrating with an organisation’s existing HR and Business Continuity Management systems
• Push technology to deliver up-to-date information which is stored locally on employees’ handsets
• Ability to activate teams and understand individual roles during an incident
• Easy deployment of updated or new incident management procedures and actions through a central server and software
• Auditing and action-tracking for post-incident debriefs
• Easy access to critical information to improve management response times
• Ability to send notification alerts about an incident to all staff.

See Bamboo in action

Rick Cudworth, head of resilience and testing at Deloitte said: “Recent tragic events around the world continue to highlight the importance of an effective and swift incident response. Reacting quickly minimises the potential impact of a disaster on an organisation. Deloitte created Bamboo to simplify this process for both our employees and our clients.

“Clients have asked us to help them access their essential information and the technology to use it effectively. In recent incidents they found plans were out-of-date, contact details were incorrect and the telecommunications network suffered failures making voice and data communications difficult.

“During an incident, the majority of employees take only their personal belongings with them, such as wallets, keys and, of course, their mobile phones. With Bamboo, staff will now be able to access their individual action plans, regardless of location or mobile network connectivity. Management will now be able to communicate with their employees immediately to inform them of the incident, verify their safety and location, and communicate necessary actions and contact details – all via their handsets.”

Although I have not had the opportunity to use this program in action, it is in line with the protocols I always recommend in my Crisis Management workshops.

One other method that you can use in the interim until your organisation decides to use a dedicated application, is to ensure that an updated contact list and flow chart of actions to be taken, is created and put in a Dropbox application. Then, all you have to do is ensure that managers have Dropbox installed on their phones.

At least that will be a start. Other than that, make sure that you keep a copy of your crisis plan – in your car, filing cabinet and at home.

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