A Conceptual Framework and a Suite of Tools to Support Crisis Management

This article aims at describing an approach to support crisis management. The main idea is to use an original vision of Big-Data to manage the question of collaboration issues in crisis response. On the one hand, this article introduces a general framework that structures the methodology applied in our approach. This framework includes several technical and business dimensions and embeds scientific results that are presented in this article or have been described in previous articles. On the other hand, the resulting implemented suite of tools is also presented with regards to the conceptual framework. Finally, in order to emphasize all the main features described in this article, both the framework and the suite of tools are illustrated and put into action through a scenario extracted from a real exercise

The reciprocity of data integration in disaster risk analysis

Humanitarian organizations are increasingly challenged by the amount of data available to drive their decisions. Useful data can come from many sources, exists in different formats, and merging it into a basis for analysis and planning often exceeds organizations’ capacities and resources. At the same time, affected communities’ participation in decision making processes is often hindered by a lack of information and data literacy capacities within the communities. We describe a participatory disaster risk analysis project in the central Philippines where the community and a humanitarian NGO worked towards a joint understanding of disaster risks and coping capacities through data integration and IT-supported analysis. We present findings from workshops, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews, showing the reciprocal effects of the collaborative work. While the community valued the systematically gathered and structured evidence that supported their own risk perceptions and advocacy efforts, the humanitarian NGO revisited established work practices for data collection for analysis and planning

Capturing sensemaking pattern during data analysis: A conceptual framework

Sensemaking is often associated with processing large or complex amounts of data obtained from diverse and distributed sources. Sensemaking is an important process for any business, since it deals with understanding data and facts that relate to unknown or ambiguous situations. To-date, the research base on sensemaking has not moved far from the conceptual realm however. Our vision here is to operationalise sensemaking in order to improve the human decision-making process (ultimately in the context of large data volumes in a business context). This study contributes to the knowledge base by proposing a novel conceptual framework that utilises Data Mining (DM) and Machine Learning (ML) to assist in transforming user interactions with the analytical software that models sensemaking patterns. These patterns reflect people’s experience during the analysis and exploration of the data related to the emergent ambiguous situation

Collective IT artifacts: Toward Inclusive Crisis Infrastructures

This paper investigates a previously overlooked phenomenon in crisis response information systems, namely inclusive crisis infrastructure. By expanding the well-acknowledged infrastructure concept with alternatives to understand the nature and scope of inclusive crisis infrastructures, this paper contributes to closing the gap between theory and practice by raising some research questions critical to the study of inclusive crisis infrastructures. The emerging literature on crisis response information systems suggests that external sourcing of information increasingly influences crisis response operations. To contribute to this discourse, the paper draws on Pipek and Wulf’s (2009) definition of work infrastructures and Palen and Liu’s (2007) conceptualization of peer-to-peer communications to develop a better understanding of the crisis response arena as a whole. In doing so, this paper goes beyond the emphasis on event-based technologies that currently dominate the crisis response information systems literature and instead argues why crisis infrastructures need to be both inward-looking and accommodating to technological and social outcomes parallel to formal response contexts. The novel conceptualization captures the fact that the crisis context contains collections of collective IT artifacts that are not aligned or related but that are, for autonomy reasons, interlinked to crisis organizations’ current IT infrastructure and may be of great value to such organizations if infrastructure capability options are considered

Impact of the Information Technology Unit on Information Technology-Embedded Product Innovation

Organizations increasingly embed IT into physical products to develop new product innovations. However, there is wide variance in the outcomes of the IT-embedded product (ITEP) innovation process. In this paper, we posit that the IT unit’s involvement in the ITEP innovation process could positively influence the outcomes. ITEP innovations become part of complex ecosystems in which they interact with their developers, customers, and other ITEPs. These developments suggest new roles for IT units of organizations. Yet, there is dearth of theory explaining how the IT unit of a firm could contribute to the firm’s development of ITEP innovations in ways to create customer value and improve firm performance. This paper seeks to address this gap. ITEP innovations present new challenges for organizations. This paper builds on complexity science to articulate the challenges and explain how the IT unit can increase an organization’s capacity to cope with them. First, the paper adopts Wheeler’s (2002) “net-enabled business innovation model” to structure the key stages of innovation that an organization goes through in developing new ITEPs. Second, the paper articulates IT-specific uncertainties and challenges entailed in each of the four stages. Third, the paper develops hypotheses explaining how the IT unit could increase the effectiveness of each stage by helping to address these uncertainties and challenges. Finally, the paper empirically tests and finds support for the hypotheses in a sample of 165 firms. The paper contributes to the literature on IT-enabled business innovations by developing and validating a new theoretical explanation of how IT units increase the effectiveness of the ITEP innovation process

A call for sensemaking support systems in crisis management

In this chapter, we explore four information processing challenges commonly experienced in crisis situations, which form the basis of the design of information systems that should support actors in these situations. When we explore the difference between Sensemaking and decision making, two activities that are undertaken to cope with information processing challenges, we can understand the two types of information systems support that are needed. The first type—decision support systems—supports actors in dealing with information-related problems of uncertainty and complexity, and is the traditional focus of information systems design. The second type—sensemaking support systems—should support actors in dealing with problems of frames of reference, ambiguity, and equivocality, but is not commonplace yet. We conducted three case studies in different crisis situations to explore these information processing challenges: A case study of the sudden crisis of an airplane crash in the Barents Rescue Exercise, a case study of the yearly recurring forest fires crises in Portugal, and a case study of the post-conflict European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We discuss design premises for crisis management information systems and compare these to our findings, and observe that systems designed accordingly will provide for the necessary Sensemaking support