Short clip: Technology is the backbone behind new emergency system

June 5, 2007, 4:14pm PDT | Length: 00:02:25
Col. John Hayes, the CIO of the Air Force Reserve Command, explains how a new emergency notification system would use IP and voice networks during a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Transcript

Short clip: Technology is the backbone behind new emergency system

Dan Farber: What specifically is the new technology that you're fielding? Is it a voice over IP system? Colonel John Hayes: Well, we've looked at voice over IP and the business case makes sense. Frankly we're not in a position right now where the business case has made sense. And in our command, resources are pretty lean for Air Force Reserve Command. We like to say that we provide about 20% of the Air Force's capability with about a 4% of the budget. And the way we're able to do that is a lot of our people are part time military members, and there are full time civilian members, so we provide an awful lot of capability for a very small share of the cost. But, what that also does that is it forces the CIO and it forces the Chief Operating Officer to figure out ways to do things very, very efficiently. Business case analysis is a very important part of that. One of the new technologies that we are fielding that we're pretty excited about is we call the Emergency Notification System. And I think it's a system we'll probably be seeing more often on college campuses as a result of what happened at Virginia Tech. And the way we use it in our command is if we have to get the word out that we have a terrorist event at one of our bases or we're having a hurricane condition at a base or a natural disaster where we need to get the word out to all of our people to either evacuate the base or evacuate the area because of a hurricane is coming ashore. If we need to reestablish accountability of our people after we have had that kind of event. We're fielding this Emergency Notification System to do exactly that. We're fielding it on an enterprise basis where the servers for our entire enterprise is at our headquarters here at Warner Robins, Georgia, but then we tap into the IP networks, we tap into the voice networks so that we can basically pass messages to our people through up to ten different ways, phones, cell phones. Dan Farber: Is this based on some unique technology that you've developed in conjunction with the private sector? Colonel John Hayes: It's a technology that frankly the private sector came to us. We had a requirement that we've been working with since Katrina hit. We had some real difficulty reestablishing connectivity to our reservists along the Gulf Coast in the New Orleans area after Katrina hit, and we have no way of getting a hold of all of the people and this technology came to us through industry and frankly that's how we get a lot of our ideas for innovation.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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