Critical Success Factors to Improve Compliance with Campus Emergency Notifications

We have recently witnessed an uptake in the number of campus related incidents. School administrations are increasinglyconcerned about notification systems to alert students against the incidents and to provide advice on actions that they wouldlike the students to take. However whether students appropriately react to notifications sent by these systems are still lessunderstood. This paper develops and validates an instrument to measure the critical factors (subjective norm, threat appraisal,message efficacy, and media richness) that motivate students to comply with the directions in the notifications. Theinstrument has been validated through a pretest, followed by a pilot test, finally a main field test based on the data collectedfrom a large Northeastern university. This research attempts to inform both theory and practice, and will help develop policysuggestions on what can be done to improve compliance with emergency notifications on university campus

Information Theoretic Approach to Design of Emergency Response Systems

Emergency response information systems provide critical support to the disaster management. Despite of the growing interest in this area, the existing research is scanty. A significant limitation is the lack of sound theoretical foundations for emergency management and the information system development. In this paper, the authors adapt Information Theory to explore the theoretical underpinnings of emergency response and discuss the general system design issues

Research, Design, and Validation of a Normative Enterprise Architecture for Guiding End-to-End, Emergency Response Services

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis and overview of a multipart research study involving the design, exploration, and validation of an enterprise architecture and framework. The methodology includes the use of two case studies and validation through a national conference. While the authors have reported on the elements of this research, only recently has its completion allowed for this synthesis and overview of the process and outcomes. A normative architecture, developed from comparative cases involving San Mateo County and Mayo Clinic Emergency Medical Services systems, provides a collection of characteristics that guides an emergency response system to operate as a high performance system. At a national symposium, academics and practitioners involved in promoting effective emergency response information systems provided validation for the architecture and next steps for enhancing emergency response information systems. Normative architecture characteristics and symposium findings are integrated into a framework that offers an enterprise approach for delivering time-critical emergency response services

PATH CREATION IN THE RAILROAD INDUSTRY: DIMENSIONS OF DESIGN IN IT-ENABLED INNOVATION

Taking a process research approach, we have followed a government agency in the railroad industry over a six-year-period as they have engaged in an IT-based innovation project. Providing empirical insights into this process and using path creation theory to analyse our case, we further our understanding of how IT-based innovations evolve over time by highlighting its multi-dimensional nature. We conclude that IT-based innovations cannot be fully understood from the material design dimension alone, i.e., by only focusing on the artefact. IT-based innovation affects and is affected also by what mental models we bring and what actors are engaged in the process. Our work thus contributes to the innovation research by showing that a focus on the material dimension only is insufficient and may result in a prolonged struggle that will not be resolved until looked upon also from a cognitive and/or organisational dimension. The inclusion of all these three dimensions from the outset may lessen the friction involved in IT-based innovation projects

The assessment of information technology maturity in emergency response organizations

[EN] In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations.Marcos R. S. Borges was partially supported by grants No. 560223/2010-2 and 480461/2009-0 from CNPq (Brazil). Work of José H. Canós is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio. de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEX (TIN2010–19859-C03-03). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/ PHB2007-0064-PC.Santos, RS.; Borges, MRS.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Gomes, JO. (2011). The assessment of information technology maturity in emergency response organizations. Group Decision and Negotiation. 20(5):593-613. doi:10.1007/s10726-011-9232-zS593613205Bigley G, Roberts KH (2001) The incident command system: high reliability organizing for complex and volatile task environments. Acad Manag J 44(6): 1281–1299Chinowsky P, Molenaar K, Realph A (2007) Learning organizations in construction. J Manag Eng 23(1): 27–34Diniz VB, Borges MRS, Gomes JO, Canós JH (2008) Decision making support in emergency response. 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Applying a Layered Framework to Disaster Recovery

Building highly available information technology (IT) infrastructures has become critical to many corporations’ survival. However, the disaster recovery (DR) industry lacks a common enterprise framework to capitalize on the value that DR provides corporations due in part to inadequate conceptual frameworks for DR that can facilitate the alignment of corporate efforts toward corporate resiliency. To address this problem, we propose a new conceptualization for the DR of enterprise architecture. This conceptual framework comprises DR layers that describe the nature of DR and its related components from a functional and technical point of view. We discuss the benefits of these DR layers to DR teams and compare our approach to traditional thinking. Further, we present a case study, its findings, and their implications for DR. As a result, we demonstrate how our layered framework of enterprise architecture provides a unified understanding of the DR practice, which one can then use to support decision making and corporate alignment of the DR practice and its associated technology

Nobody Said IT Was Easy - Managing Government-Initiated Information Systems in Addressing and Preparing for Health Crises

COVID-19 served to teach governments many painful lessons about their pitfalls and challenges in managing public health crises. Although both practitioners and academics have been aware that crisis information systems (CIS) constitute a valuable tool for crisis prevention and management, their implementation to counteract COVID-19 lagged by months. To analyze this crisis management mismatch, in this paper, we examine and identify the structural challenges and shortcomings of government-initiated crisis management through CIS. This paper analyzes two CIS projects tackling the COVID-19 crisis, funded by the German government. Drawing on a complexity-lens and the NASSS-framework, key shortcomings are identified. We derive propositions for future CIS projects to enable crisis preparedness. Our outcomes suggest that adopting a complexity perspective in planning, initiating, and developing governmental CIS provides a promising avenue for achieving successful crisis management. We contribute to literature by highlighting the suitability of the complexity-lens in health crises

Assuring Homeland Security: Continuous Monitoring, Control and Assurance of Emergency Preparedness

This paper examines the potential relationships of Continuous Auditing and Emergency Preparedness to the design, development, and implementation of Emergency Response Management Information Systems (ERMIS). It develops an argument for the integration of emergency response processes and continuous decision process auditing requirements into the system development life cycle of an organization wide ERMIS

Traffic incident management: A common operational picture to support situational awareness of sustainable mobility

Successful traffic incident management presupposes a multi-disciplinary approach. To meet appropriately the safety and mobility needs of all affected parties, traffic incidents call for a high level of collaboration and coordination of involved agencies. Effective traffic incident management activities rely in particular on flexible communications and information systems. Based on experiences from the military domain it is possible to develop strategic concepts that are related to the improvement of information sharing and collaboration. Such concepts can also be applied to enhanced traffic incident management information systems. The present paper aims to offer a review of the state of the art in this field and to illustrate the empirical usefulness and benefits of traffic incident management