Never think that a crisis management tool on its own as a miracle or silver bullet solution – its effectiveness will be dependent on how you manage it after set-up.
Whilst all the criteria-meeting tools from the previous section are very powerful, it’s important to bear a few other elements in mind:
- To achieve the tool’s full potential, it’s important to make full and correct use of all the functions and avoid changing the initial usage of the tool functionalities
- Correct set-up of your tool is key to ensure its full effectiveness Once your needs have been clearly identified, it’s vital that you specify and track settings (ie. restrictions and administrator rights, etc.)
- Man versus machine: Keep in mind the tool’s potential limitations: whilst some tasks can be replaced by a tool, others will never be done as well as by a real person, especially in a crisis scenario.
The tool is essentially a gateway to well-coordinated new horizons, but its power can only be fully harnessed if you put the right strategies and groundwork in place first.
Equally, if not correctly managed, such tools can have negative repercussions. Taking the Everbridge crisis management tool as an example, if its Mass Alerting feature is not set up properly, it will not send the right messages to the right people when required. This means that, if an organization is relying on this function, its crisis management could be set back and made more complex than expected if insufficient preparations are made from the start.
