“Keep calm and notify” (part 3)

As a business continuity professional, getting budget to do anything can be tough. I’ve been in the position where I’ve had to make hard budget choices: do I get a new tool or do I invest in people? Doing both is not possible, but where is the budget best spent? What yields the best ROI or the largest risk? I’m sure this is not unfamiliar to some of you. In this case I looked for ways to leverage already existing investments.

Having a unified communications platform that can manage multiple use cases can be used as a life line. The moment you have your different business uses lining up to take services, is the moment you know you can do more. Be this business critical communication or IT alerting, spreading the cost of your notification system can allow you to diffuse the cost and spend in other areas.

My favourite example was when I was approached by a business who used Everbridge for emergency notification asking if they could do shift notification, i.e., informing employees of optional overtime shifts at very short notice and collecting responses. The current manual process caused problems as once overtime shifts had been offered, the notification could not be retracted or not enough people were informed and product orders could not be filled. This use case resulted in a significant hard saving per month and allowed me to not only demonstrate the value of critical communications but also to recharge. On the other hand, the business was able to save because it did not have to go out and invest in a new system. A true win/win for everyone!  With this extra little bit of flexibility in my budget I was able to do more with less.

Another case saw the replacement of IT alerting… But that is another story for another day.