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Deloitte has long recognised the challenge of business continuity during times of crisis, specifically around providing dispersed staff with accurate and real-time information about the situation and their expected response. Deloitte brought together a team of risk advisory specialists, mobile application developers and usability subject matter experts to develop a new business continuity management (BCM) platform named Bamboo™. Bamboo™ allows staff to access, and act on, the most up-to-date business continuity, IT disaster recovery, crisis and incident management plans and procedures via their smartphone. Bamboo™ is a flexible and resilient application, capable of weathering a crisis.

Organisation

Deloitte

Team

Multiple team members

Imagine the unthinkable… a crisis occurs and people need to leave their workplace within minutes. They grab their personal belongings; keys, wallets and phones but how do they know what to do next and who to call?
When a crisis occurs, would you know what to do?
The answers can be found in Bamboo™, the Business Continuity Management (BCM) smart phone solution.

Key features of Bamboo include:
• Convenient Smartphone (iPhone and BlackBerry) access to an organisation's business continuity plan
• Access to latest contact details by integrating with an organisation’s existing HR and BCM systems
• Push technology to deliver up-to-date information which is stored locally on employees’ handsets
• A one stop-shop to activate teams and understand individual roles during an incident
• Easy deployment of updated or new incident management procedures and actions through a central server and software
• Auditing and action-tracking for post-incident debriefs
• Easy access to critical information to improve management response times
• Ability to send notification alerts about an incident to all staff
• Ability to locate staff in a time of emergency (Locate my Team - coming soon)
The Bamboo offering includes a java based management console that enables the convenient updating of BCM plan and organisational contact data. In the event of a crisis, the management console can be used by risk management personnel as a communication centre and to push messages and information to targeted recipients, and locate members of their team.

Bamboo™ dramatically improves the execution of business continuity plans and enables organisations to benefit from the pervasive deployment of smartphones. Improved business continuity management capability ensures that large organisations are prepared for times of crisis where quick response, targeted communication and directed action are critical to minimising the negative impacts of unexpected events.

Bamboo brings the following innovative features:

 Enterprise mobile application deployment
 Live User location broadcasting and tracking on a map
 Dynamic Application updates pushed over the air from a central server (Reduces Mobile Application Update Distribution overhead)
 Support for multiple enterprises and push notifications to multiple platforms including BlackBerry and iOS
 White label mobile application which can be registered and configured via email/sms from a central server which pushes down application profile
 Use of a NoSQL database on the server side to allow dynamic content attributes and ease of integration with other third party systems via RESTFul web services
 Karotz Bunny was used to visually notify developers when Continuous Integration environment failed to build. This added a little bit of fun to the build process with the bunny’s ears perking up when there was a failure!

One of the key principles for Bamboo was that the solution had to be very easy for anyone in the business to use to access critical information to improve management’s response times during a crisis. As the user may be in a state of panic during the crisis this was critical in the design of the app.
- Mobile phone will nearly always be located with the person
- Uses mobile app standard communication channels (alerts, SMS) to engage with the user in the time of crisis
- Design considerations across two distinctly different smartphone handset classes
- Designed to engage with the user in different modes - in time of peace and emergency. In particular, apps need to be highly intuitive during times of emergency

Firstly, Deloitte has the advantage of already being an existing consultant in the BCM market, so we had a number of firms who we were already engaged with. This was important from a product development perspective, as well as marketing.
Deloitte has used traditional online marketing channels such as the Deloitte public website, along with the Deloitte Online website which has featured the Bamboo case study for some time. Social media has also played a part in the strategy including utilising YouTube to show the functionality of some of the features within the app.
Deloitte has won a number of recent awards for the Bamboo solution, including:
• MoMo2010 Award: Enterprise App of the Year
• 2011 Australian Business Award for Product Innovation