Miami Herald Feature – Business Continuity Information Network

“Storm Warning” (Part 1, Part 2) discusses the motivation and approach for the Business Continuity Information Network (BCIN) system. BCIN is being developed by the School of Computer and Information Sciences at FIU to provide small and medium businesses with the information they need to recover quickly from a storm. “Business owners need to know when their lights are going to come on…they need to know that barrier islands are being evacuated….” and they need this information in real-time. BCIN is being developed in South Florida among a growing group of participants so that vital information for small business is only a few clicks away. As the system matures, BCIN will develop into a nationwide web-based recovery system.

Acknowledgements

The Business Continuity Information Network is funded by the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University as a public service to the community. We wish to acknowledge the generous support from the Department of Homeland Security via Grant # 2009-ST-062-000016 entitled “Information Delivery and Knowledge Discovery for Hurricane Disaster Management”, DHS Grant # 2010-ST-062-000039 entitled “A Research and Educational Framework to Advance Disaster Information Management in Computer Science PhD Programs,” the National Science Foundation via grant NSF HRD-0833093 entitled “CREST: Center for Innovative Information Systems Engineering,”, and IBM through its Shared University Research Program.