Skip to Content

CIO Letter Head

To:                   Emergency Communications Committee                                                May 1, 2007
           
From:               Michael Kerntke, Chief Information Officer

Subject:            Confirmation of new Roles and Responsibilities

 

It has become apparent from events that have occurred over the past several years that responsible institutions plan for how best to communicate with their constituents during emergency events.  Ensuring the safety and well being of students, faculty, staff and other affiliates is of prime importance and effective communications plans must be adopted and vetted.  To that end this committee has been formed to investigate the requirements and specifications; to perform the acquisition, configuration and implementation; and to define a communication strategy for an Emergency Communications Plan for the University of Connecticut (UConn).  In order for this initiative to be implemented by the Fall 07 semester a large commitment of time and energy will be required of the team.

As stated above the end goal of this initiative will be the creation of a plan that will guide the University in the communication of information to our constituents during times of crisis.  It is generally accepted that no one means of communication will effectively reach our entire audience and that the final plan will incorporate various technologies, both high and low tech, which used in conjunction with each other,  to provide an acceptable avenue of alerts and informational updates.  These technologies may include, but not be limited to, sirens, voice mail, text messaging, web pages, email, FM radio and loud speakers.  Our initial goal is to quickly arrive at a specification of the appropriate technologies to utilize at the UConn Storrs campus.  To the extent possible these technologies will be incorporated at the UConn branch campuses and Health Center as well.

As part of the process improvement initiative at UConn, known as BEST, an “Emergency Response Management Plan” was created to guide the Storrs campus in responding to various types of emergencies.  A section of this plan deals with constituent communications during an emergency.  The focus of this project is to provide the mechanisms that will be employed by the Emergency Communications Center to communicate information during the emergency event.

The deliverables of this initiative are:

This initiative must be successful in a short time frame and as such an effective project management structure must be defined and incorporated from the beginning.  I propose that this group will function as the Emergency Communications Project Team and will be charged with ensuring that the scope of the project is identified and adopted, that resources that are requested be distributed to the project as necessary and that communications and policy issues necessitated by the project are raised to the Steering Committee to be resolved within the University.  The overall University management responsibility for the project lies with the Steering Committee.

The executive sponsor for this project is Barry Feldman, Chief Operating Officer.  As such he will ensure that the Senior Executive Team is apprised of the progress of the team.  He together with Scott Brohinsky, Bob Hudd and I will comprise the Steering Committee which will ensure that the necessary resources are provided to successfully complete the initiative and that policy and communications oversight for the initiative are accomplished. 

In order to effectively manage the project I am appointing Jane Bachand from University Information Technology Services (UTIS) to assume the role of overall project manager.  As the project manager her role will include but not be limited to ensuring that appropriate timelines are established, resources (staff and financial) are identified, acquired and assigned, facilitation of teams, development (in conjunction with the Project Team and Steering Committee) and incorporation of necessary scope documentation and overall oversight of the initiative.  As the project manager Jane will provide regular status reports to the Steering Committee.

It is apparent that several technologies will be incorporated into the final plan.  A number of technologies should be evaluated at our initial meeting with an eye toward picking those that we can implement by the Fall 07 semester.  We will organize teams to address each technology that we select.  It should be noted that the technologies selected for our initial rollout are to be targeted at communicating with constituents in a true life and death situation.  At a minimum the following technologies should be discussed at our initial meeting:

The work of these teams will directly impact the final communications infrastructure and so their charge will be made immediately.  The deadlines for them to report back to the Project Team should be set during our initial meeting.

I appreciate your willingness to participate in this important University endeavor and look forward to a productive effort.