By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering Remember snow days? Watching the 6:30 am news January mornings for school closings at the age of 12 was captivating. Plant and jobsite closings later in life are just a pain. Corporate phone trees grow large and become difficult to maintain. Delivering anything other than a "site's closed" message can be tricky -- how do you make sure everyone in the phone tree delivers the right message the right way? Message consistency is that last thing you want to worry about at 5:30 am on a bad weather day. And auditing is tricky. How do you know for sure that everyone was supposed to call actually made the right calls? Managers shouldn't have to ask these questions. Phone trees to shut down a jobsite (think construction and utilities here) are, on the one hand, the most basic thing in the world and, on the other hand, a completely unnecessary source of risk. Scripting can fix this. I've been blogging about the different Jaduka APIs recently. And the Weather Alerts & Realtime Notification System or WARNS -- which you can read more about here -- is another good example of how we've been able to communications-enable a plain old business process. How's it work? You're the decision-maker at utility company. Uou've got jobsites in New Mexico and Arizona. Bad weather rolls around and you've gotta make three site closings. You dial into the 800 number that we've set up ahead of time and the system prompts you to record your message. "Sites at ..., ... and ... are all closed for Friday the 29th of February ..." You listen and rerecord a couple of times until you've got the message exactly right. The system prompts you to press nine when you're ready to send. You press nine. WARNS dips into database tables, pulls out home telephone numbers, and dials all on-site personnel at home. "Does the system call everyone at once?" People always want to know. We do it in blocks of about 92 employees at a time. It's very fast. And there's a bit of coolness on the receiving end of WARNS, too. Employees hear their phone ring, pick up, and hear a prompt. "Incoming jobsite closure message from the ... Weather Alerts & Realtime Notification System. To accept, press 1. To reject, press 2." Employees press one and hear your message: "Sites at ..., ... and ... are all closed for Friday the 29th of February." You configure your own repeat counts and so your message probably plays two or three times. And all keypad presses -- all those 1s and 2s your employees press when they answer the phone -- report back to the WARNS administrative webpages in realtime. Which means you always know who got your messages ... and when. The name of the game with WARNS and our other CEBP solutions is reduction of human latency. Human latency is a cover term for the amount of time it takes to bring your team members up to speed and able to help out. WARNS reduces the human latency in traditional I've-called-you-now-you-call-the-next-guy phone trees enormously. The result is that everybody finds out about site closures at pretty much the same time. And you completely eliminate the wait-period where parts of the team know what's going on while other parts of the team are still in the dark. The fact that tracking reports tell you who answered the phone and who didn't is definitely useful. But the real draw is the enormous reduction in human latency. Reducing humany latency helps make sure everyone knows where they fit. And fast.