IU-Notify fails to deliver

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you survived the “Icepocalypse” of 2011 — probably with little to no help from IU-Notify.

As many members of the IU community recently learned, we’ve got some work to do when it comes to alerting the campus population of emergency situations.

According to its website, IU-Notify, the collective name for all of the emergency notification methods employed by IU, “greatly enhances the University’s ability to effectively transmit critical incident information.”

While I appreciate that we have such coordination in place, it seems to not serve much value when it takes so long to get notifications out.

The IU-Bloomington Twitter account (@IUBloomington) responded to criticism of the system’s apparent weaknesses with a tweet: “Yes, IU-Notify did take some time to deliver. E-mails, phone calls and text messages are sent to more than 30,000 people.”
Let’s break this tweet down, shall we?

I would agree that the message “did take some time to deliver.” I received a text message telling me that classes were cancelled starting at 2:30 p.m. — at 2:58 p.m. My phone call came at 3:12 p.m.

Luckily, like most of the student body, I was already continuously refreshing the IU Emergency Preparedness website in anticipation of such news, so I didn’t have to brave the streets in order to get to class.

Also, it’s interesting that the fact that notifications are “... sent to more than 30,000 people” was used as an excuse. Phone calls do take a while; I get that.

However, considering text messages can only contain a maximum of 140 characters (and e-mails consume a similarly small amount of bandwidth), I have trouble understanding why it took so long to send out thousands of them.

A needless walk to campus isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things, but what if the situation involved a gun or bomb instead of ice and rain?

Clearly, the University wants to be prepared for the worst (the campus emergency website frequently asked questions to discuss the possibility of a terrorist attack in Bloomington).

Students, faculty and staff go about their daily business with a sense of security, knowing (or hoping) they’ll be informed quickly in the event of a dangerous situation. To that end, it’s surprising that we consider our current notification system anything but unacceptable.

The recent tragedy in Tucson, Ariz., happened in a matter of minutes. It would be a shame if a text message not received were to mean an unnecessary slip on the ice — or a life lost.