Following my roles as Statutory Deputy Mayor of London, Chair of the London Resilience Forum and Chair of the 7 July Review Committee, I have been searching for a communications system that has the potential to enhance the resilience of cities and corporations and aid their business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
I am very proud to say that the Report of the 7 July Review Committee has had a major impact, globally, on disaster response and resilience planning, with over 300,000 copies being distributed or downloaded since it was first published.
One of the main focuses of the 7 July Review was to identify ways in which communications could be improved in the future to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the response to major or catastrophic incidents. Many of the recommendations from the 7 July Review concerned the difficulties in communications experienced both by those caught up in the bombings and those public and emergency services responsible for responding to the multiple incidents.
Chaos and mayhem is commonplace during the aftermath of major incidents and communications during the first hour is always a massive challenge, as it was on 7 July 2005. It is my belief that had a cloud-based, multi-channel, mass communications platform like Crises Control been available back then it would have greatly helped in the rescue and recovery effort during that first golden hour.
When I first heard about Crises Control I was so excited by its potential that I immediately contacted Rickie, who I have known personally for many years. Rickie seemed to be just as excited to hear from me and both of us could immediately see the natural synergy between my own experience and interests and the application of the Crises Control platform.
From then on it was only a matter of time before I formally came on board as an advisor to Rickie and the team at Crises Control. Having found out more about it, I remain very excited by the potential of the Crises Control platform and its mobile app to transform the ability of organisations, large and small, to respond to business disruption incidents of all magnitudes.
So I look forward to working with the team here in exploring how we can get the benefits of Crises Control out to more organisations, to improve their resilience and recovery in the face of major and minor incidents.
Richard Barnes
