When all employees in the London area had been accounted for, Marlow sent out a worldwide e-mail alert. "As a global company, we have people all over the world, and in the event of a major disaster, everyone wants to know about people’s safety," Marlow says.

Meanwhile, in London, McCrae had convinced the owner of a pub in Leicester Square to allow him and two colleagues to hole up there for the afternoon. With the trains and buses stopped, traffic closed, and phone and cellular networks failing, McCrae spent the next hours using his BlackBerry, which was drifting in and out of service, to send and receive information. "That day was filled with lots of uncertainty, and many companies struggled to communicate," says McCrae, who was able to feed information about the attack and its aftermath to colleagues who then updated the IRS. "I didn’t realize the power of the portal until then," he says.

Gale GFS isn’t the first or the only company to use a combination of Internet and mobile technologies to keep track of employees and monitor crisis situations. Companies are increasingly looking at building websites that can account for the whereabouts and status of employees (and in the hotel industry, guests), says George Washington University’s Harrald. Others are looking into Web conferencing systems that can provide emergency meetings around the world. And some are considering using companies such as iJet and U.K.-based Control Risks Group to provide Web conferencing services that can keep tabs on far-flung employees and also provide a dashboard on which executives can monitor employee whereabouts and safety.

Security software vendor SunGard Availability Services has offered a "notification service" for the past three years that allows companies to keep in touch with employees through multiple channels. Don Norbeck, product manager at SunGard Availability Services, says the service was initially hard to sell, but no more.

"Technology is starting to replace traditional call chains," says Harrald. Up until 9/11, companies viewed crisis management primarily as an exercise in property protection. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that perception changed. For example, Harrald knows an employee of a large bank who, in the wake of 9/11, had to call the homes of thousands of employees to see if they were alive. "Companies are trying to get away from that," he says.
For organizations now looking to build a system to track employees and share information during a crisis, Gale GFS serves as a model for those who want to add a discussion board to an already existing intranet or portal. Mellin, who is a portfolio manager on the AT&T account and has been using the system for the past three years, says he would recommend the simple, Internet-based system because the need for training will be very low. By adding a forum or chat module to an existing secure intranet site or portal, companies can quickly document an employee’s safety, while sending important information to those in the field. Messineo says that such modules are relatively easy to develop internally using tools such as Microsoft .Net and are very easy to maintain. All data can be backed up each day on a standard Dell server using .Net SQL and on a duplicate server offsite.