Nearly every UN organization has staff, consultants and other personnel working remotely in this day and age. And due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, many more and sometimes entire organizations are working away from the office. When this current pandemic has slowed, there will undoubtedly be a new normal where remote working will be further embraced. This introduces a new priority – know where your staff and stakeholders are at all times and have an effective tool to share emergency updates and alerts.
UNICC’s Enterprise Notification System (ENS) is a communications service that allows UNICC to connect with its personnel at any time and in any place. This enterprise tool delivers efficient two-way communications to employees during emergencies and unplanned disruptions. The system is available for use by other UN Agencies.
Notifications can be sent on diverse media, including email, mobile phones, landlines and text messages. The ENS tool also allows for instant communication with the entire organization or selected target groups defined by location and/or function.
During a crisis or disaster, normal methods of communication are unlikely to be available when you need them most. The ENS tool provides the communications backbone for crisis management and other critical enterprise notifications.
The ENS tool uses multiple communications channels depending on the type of notification or the escalation settings defined in the user profile. The ENS main features are:
- User settings
- Escalation settings
- Broadcast groups
- Notification templates
- Schedule notifications
- Notification response processes.
The ENS can be used in the following situations:
- Sending alerts for an immediate threat (e.g. extreme weather, demonstration, terrorist attack) that requires contact with all personnel and follow-up action in case of no response
- Triggering service continuity procedures following a widespread incident
- Reaching out to personnel to request specific action with a confirmation receipt (e.g. update personal details in staff database, personnel-specific incident notification and contact verification).
UNICC is now offering support to customize the ENS tool for its Clients and Partner Organizations. This entails configuring each subscriber’s ENS to manage its organizational users and groups, set up data collection specifications, create notification templates to use, compose and send alerts and notifications as well as allow relevant teams and organizational leadership to review notification reports.
The ENS service is managed by the Client with UNICC providing tier-2 support and escalations to the vendor. The service allows the Client to ensure fast and efficient alerts to all organizational personnel. This simple, effective and efficient ENS tool provides excellent business continuity value to keep the UN family aware and safe during these challenging times and beyond.
