Universities face increasingly global and complex risks, ranging from an avian flu pandemic to the impact of climate change. If disaster does strike, it is crucial that institutions like UC Davis have plans in place to get their operations back on track as quickly as possible.

That is the gist of a March 29 case study on how UC Davis would continue its operations in the wake of a disaster. While there is much work to do, the report by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research states that the university's "collaborative spirit" will help in preparing for disasters — whether extreme weather, pandemics, shootings or earthquakes.

"The whole issue of business continuity and disaster recovery is a matter of stepping up to the plate, saying there is risk, and acknowledging that we need to protect all of our constituents," Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef said in the report.

In the last 18 months, UC Davis has bolstered its safety operations in a number of ways, from hiring an emergency manager to conducting a wide-ranging pandemic planning exercise. All this comes as an improvement to a historically decentralized, fragmentary system of emergency planning at UC Davis. The lines of command, for example, were not always conducive to communications. As recently as 2003, the police and fire chiefs reported to two different supervisors.

"We had a disconnect," said Vice Chancellor of Administration Stan Nosek, adding that a more holistic and participatory emergency management system was subsequently put in place.

On top of this, Emergency Manager Valerie Lucus, a former emergency manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Marin County, sharpened the focus and organization in the planning process. "She is the coach," Mike Allred, associate vice chancellor for finance said in the report, "explaining what we have to do to prepare, why we have to do it, and what it means to you."

For any organization, maintaining its computer and technology services after a disaster is often difficult — especially at a place like UC Davis where the IT operations are very diverse and decentralized. The problem is that if a particular building burns down, 30 years of research may literally go up in smoke.

With this in mind, Information and Educational Technology is enhancing its current data facilities so units can house their critical data in a central campus location. The key challenge is encouraging individual units to make use of the centralized data center.

"There is a strong sense that we need a significant investment to ensure that data is entered and housed in a centralized warehouse or in another service where researchers are confident that their data is well protected," said Pete Siegel, vice provost of Information and Educational Technology.

In late 2005, when global health authorities grew concerned about the possibility of an avian flu pandemic, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw consequently made pandemic planning an institutional mandate. The series of exercises and planning provided a business continuity model for all departments to follow and work together on. The collaborations may not come as a surprise to those well-grounded in UC Davis interdisciplinary tradition.

"We partner well internally and externally — passing 'Sandbox 101,'" Hinshaw told EDUCAUSE. "Our agricultural roots as well as our interdisciplinary graduate programs tie a lot of people from different areas together."

Arguably the most likely scenario for disaster coping at UC Davis, the study maintains, is the possibility of the university serving as a "relocation" center after a Bay Area earthquake.

Both the pandemic planning and Nosek's emergency management reorganization are solid "first steps" toward a strong business continuity plan, according to the EDUCAUSE document. In a sense, it is a matter of the entire university working together when it comes to responding to and communicating about a disaster.

"It is a cyclical, iterative and synchronistic process," Lucus told the interviewers. "You can do one thing and it has to fit into everything else."

Communications critical

What is next for UC Davis? The university is committed to holding monthly emergency operations meetings, and it has scheduled extensive practice sessions. One area that is receiving attention is communication, and how the institution gets the word out directly to its people, all the way down deep into the departments.

The need for rapid communications became all the more clear in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, when universities everywhere realized how quickly they must communicate with their students and employees in the event of such emergencies. At UC Davis, plans are under way to acquire new, more sophisticated communications technology that would allow for fast notifications to all campus community members.

"When we started, we did not know how big the iceberg would be," Academic Senate Chair Linda Bisson said in the report.

The document describes UC Davis' business continuity activities as still "nascent" for a process that is "never complete." In the end, raising awareness about emergency management and getting more people involved is the shape of things to come.

Titled Creating an Institutional Frame-work for Business Continuity, the Davis study was based on interviews with UC Davis officials and supplemented with data from a larger EDUCAUSE study on business continuity at 340 higher education institutions. The UC Davis case study is available at safetyservices.ucdavis.edu/emergencymgmt/downloads/ecarstudy.pdf