Public transport is characterised by large amounts of information. This is especially true of railed transport. Much of the information changes only slowly but there is often new information with a very ‘short shelf life’ which needs to be distributed widely and quickly. Whilst some of this information is generated as electronic data and can be automatically distributed immediately, much of it may be dependent on human action such as decisions made regarding very short notice service alterations.

You may need to get this information to a very diverse audience including your own staff, staff of other organisations, (intending) passengers and/or their partners.

In regard to passengers, it has been shown in all surveys that have been done, that they place a high value on timely information and also are highly critical of any failures to deliver such to them. These positive and negative aspects are reflected in their usage of the services concerned.

Over the years advances in technology have increased the range of devices that such people may use for picking up information. This has given the opportunity to increase the efficacy of information distribution. It has also of course increased the expectation of many passengers to be advised using this latest technology. The expectation of the passengers who are less modern technology minded meanwhile remains of being advised by more traditional communication methods.

Specifically, staff and/or others in an office or at home may well use e-mail (although people at home may not necessarily pay as much attention to it as those at work). Some offices still have fax machines as a major communication channel, and of course most staff in offices now have a pc running at their desk.  Mobile staff may have pagers, mobile phones or palmtop devices.  As stated above, the more traditional methods such as broadcast radio and television should not be forgotten as they remain major sources of information for many people (especially car radios).

This complexity is increased by the fact that many of the required recipients have multiple devices and use different ones at different times. The detail of which device is being used may be known for some (such as some of your own staff) but completely unknown for others (particularly passengers and those associated with them).

Inputting information into multiple devices can easily consume considerable human resource time when such resources are already stretched because of the need to deal with the problem that is causing the need for the information to be disseminated.

So what would be an optimum business requirement solution?

It would clearly be a system where the information is entered as rapidly as possible once only and then distributed to all the required recipients using the appropriate modes of communication.

This is precisely what Tyrell, Nexus Alpha’s incident managing and messaging system, does.