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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Hurricane Watch
Hurricane Earl nearing, tech firms consider alternate business processes
By James M. Connolly
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As Hurricane Earl moves toward New England, Mass High Tech raised the question of when tech companies should shut their doors and send employees home to their families.
Also, check out sites where you can catch a satellite image of Earl and track the likely path hurricanes and tropicals storms. And, learn which New England tech companies make their livings off weather-related products and services.
What do you need to consider when facing having to close up because of weather?
John Clancy, president of Azuki Systems Inc. of Acton, said, “There’s probably two major tracks you are looking at. First is the human track — you want to make sure your people are safe. You don’t want them to be put in a position where their safety is compromised. The other track is that things like the business, the building, the hard assets are safe. The common denominator on both of those tracks is process and policy. Whether you are a small startup just off the white board or a Fortune 500 company you really have to have the process and the policies so that its muscle memory when something like this happens.”
Kenny Rounds said his IT service firm, Braver Technology Solutions in Taunton, would use “typical snowstorm procedures” if a hurricane appeared to be bearing down. Staff members at the 24-employee company spend about half of their time on the road, so if a staffer felt they were in an unsafe environment, they would be expected to “turn around and get out of there,” he said.
“Safety is number one,” said Rounds, CEO of the company.
But the company wouldn’t likely close simply based on a forecast, he said. “We’d be closed half the time if we did that,” Rounds said.
And, a storm doesn’t mean a business is totally shut down in these days of home and mobile computing. Asked what percentage of his workforce could work from home in the event of bad weather, Clancy said, “I would say at this point we are close to 100 percent – I’d peg it at about 95 percent. Part of that is the benefit of being a startup and being nimble and leveraging new technology to make sure that you have the ability to be productive no matter where you are. There are a lot of tools and technologies now in the world we live in to allow that to happen.”
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