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An interesting idea. Another commenter pointed out the need to train staff regularly on its use.

Something else that would be a challenge for your idea would be how to handle the orders of magnitude efficiencies in scaling gained from digital technology.

Emergency call centres often (or at least should!!) have these paper or card based backup processes - notes are taken on the card based on the call, addresses written manually, and the card is carried to a dispatch desk (perhaps sitting on a handheld radio if the main system is unavailable), passing information to response teams. Handling of each call requires more people, and gets you a much lower throughput (manually writing addresses, without lookups for spelling correction, reading them with phonetics over the radio to drivers etc).

How many times have you tried to call a business during an incident or disruption and been unable to get through on the phone, because they aren't staffed to a level that can handle any significant % of their customers calling at once? (Often, these companies lack tech company style realtime status pages as well, which could arguably reduce call numbers).

I do think there's some merit in trying to help organisations improve process and procedure resilience, but it doesn't strike me that it will be effective unless normal staffing levels are nearer the levels needed for "crunch" operations (or people are kept "on call" at extra cost to be available).

There are however a lot of good lessons that should be learned from the wider fiasco around technology resilience and systems design, and part of that should include independent (with as close to entirely independent failure modes as possible) redundancy systems.




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