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. In: Encyclopedia of decision making, Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global), New York, pp 184–191Dörner R, Grimm P, Seiler C (2001) ETOILE—an environment for team, organizational and individual learning. CG Top 13(3): 5–6Dykstra E (2003) Concept paper: toward an international system model in emergency management. In: Proceedings of toward an international system model in emergency management, Public Entity Risk InstituteFederal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (1998) Emergency management guide for business and industry: a step-by-step approach to emergency planning, response and recovery for companies of all sizesGu Q, Mendonça D (2005) Patterns of group information seeking in a simulated emergency response environment. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international ISCRAM conference, Brussels, BelgiumHale J (1997) A layered communication architecture for the support of crisis response. J Manag Inf Syst 14(1): 235–255King W, Teo T (1997) Integration between business planning and information systems planning: validating a stage hypothesis. Decis Sci 28(2): 279–307Lachner J, Hellwagner H (2008) Information and communication systems for mobile emergency response. Lecture notes in business information processing, vol 5. pp 213–224Lavoie D, Culbert A (1978) Stages in organization and development. Human Relat 31(5): 417–438Lindel MK, Prater C, Perry RW (2007) Emergency management. Wiley, New YorkLlavador M, Letelier P, Penadés MC, Borges MRS, Solís C (2006) Precise yet flexible specification of emergency resolution procedures. In: Proceedings of the information systems for crisis response and management (ISCRAM), pp 110–120Meissner A, Wang Z, Putz W, Grimmer J (2006) MIKoBOS: a mobile information and communication system for emergency response. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international ISCRAM conference, Newark, New JerseyNonaka I, Takeuchi H (1995) The knowledge creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press, OxfordOchoa S, Neyem A, Pino JA, Borges MRS (2007) Supporting group decision making and coordination in urban disasters relief efforts. J Decis Syst 16(2): 143–172Paton D, Flin R (1999) Disaster stress: an emergency management perspective. Disaster Prev Manag 8(4): 261–267Paulk MC, Weber C, Curtis B, Chrissis M (1995) The capability maturity model: guidelines for improving the software process. Addison-Wesley, ReadingQuarantelli EL (1997) Problematical aspects of the information/communication revolution for disaster planning and research: ten non-technical issues and questions. Disaster Prev Manag 6(2): 94–106Santos RS, Borges MRS, Gomes JO, Canós JH (2008) Maturity levels of information technologies in emergency response organizations. In: Proceedings of the international workshop on groupware, Omaha, Nebraska, USA. Groupware: design, implementation and use. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5411. Springer, Berlin, pp 135–150Schoenharl T, Szabo G, Madey G, Barabasi AL (2006) WIPER: a multi-agent system for emergency response. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international ISCRAM conference, Newark, New JerseyTuroff M (2002) Past and future emergency response information systems. Commun ACM 45(4): 29–33Turoff M, Chumer M, Hiltz R, Clasher R, Alles M, Vasarhelyi M, Kogan A (2004a) Assuring homeland security: continuous monitoring, control and assurance of emergency preparedness. J Inf Technol Theor Appl (JITTA) 6(3): 1–24Turoff M, Chumer M, Vande Walle B, Yao X (2004b) The design of a dynamic emergency response management information system (DERMIS). J Inf Technol Theor Appl (JITTA) 5(4): 1–35Van der Lee MDE, Van Vugt M (2004) IMI—An information system for effective multidisciplinary incident management. In: Proceedings of the 1st international ISCRAM conference, Brussels, BelgiumYuan Y, Deltor B (2005) Intelligent mobile crisis response systems. Commun ACM 28(2): 95–98Zimmerman R, Restrepo CE (2006) Information technology (IT) and critical infrastructure interdependencies for emergency response. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international ISCRAM conference, Newark, New Jerse

A manifesto for a socio-technical approach to NHS and social care IT-enabled business change - to deliver effective high quality health and social care for all

80% of IT projects are known to fail. Adopting a socio-technical approach will help them to succeed in the future. The socio-technical proposition is simply that any work system comprises both a social system (including the staff, their working practices, job roles, culture and goals) and a technical system (the tools and technologies that support and enable work processes). These elements together form a single system comprising interacting parts. The technical and the social elements need to be jointly designed (or redesigned) so that they are congruent and support one another in delivering a better service. Focusing on one aspect alone is likely to be sub-optimal and wastes money (Clegg, 2008). Thus projects that just focus on the IT will almost always fail to deliver the full benefits

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

Thereʼs no ʻIʼ in ʻEmergency Management Team:ʼ designing and evaluating a serious game for training emergency managers in group decision making skills

Serious games are games that are designed to educate rather than entertain. The game outlined and evaluated here was commissioned and designed as a tool to improve the group decision making skills of people who manage real-world emergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemical spills. The game design exploits research on decision making groups and applies pedagogically sound games design principles. An evaluation of the game design was carried out based on a paper prototype. Eight participants were recruited and assigned to two groups of four participants each. These groups were video recorded while playing the game and the video was analysed in terms of game actions and member participation. Results indicate that the group who behaved in a more appropriate manner for a decision making group were rewarded with more positive feedback from the game state. These findings suggest that the game itself delivers appropriate feedback to players on their collaborative behaviour and is thus fit for the purposes intended in the current project

Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua

Alternative sweetener from curculigo fruits

This study gives an overview on the advantages of Curculigo Latifolia as an alternative sweetener and a health product. The purpose of this research is to provide another option to the people who suffer from diabetes. In this research, Curculigo Latifolia was chosen, due to its unique properties and widely known species in Malaysia. In order to obtain the sweet protein from the fruit, it must go through a couple of procedures. First we harvested the fruits from the Curculigo trees that grow wildly in the garden. Next, the Curculigo fruits were dried in the oven at 50 0C for 3 days. Finally, the dried fruits were blended in order to get a fine powder. Curculin is a sweet protein with a taste-modifying activity of converting sourness to sweetness. The curculin content from the sample shown are directly proportional to the mass of the Curculigo fine powder. While the FTIR result shows that the sample spectrum at peak 1634 cm–1 contains secondary amines. At peak 3307 cm–1 contains alkynes

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio