The Past Two Decades in Disaster Information Management: Academic Contributors and Topical Evolution

Academic Research in Disaster Information Management has been conducted over more than two decades worldwide. The scholarly community, numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands of contributors, has produced a body of knowledge that comprises over four thousand peer-reviewed academic articles. With this volume of research, Disaster Information Management has grown into a sizable domain of study and reached a critical mass of output, which justifies topical and directional analyses that in turn help identify potential gaps in scholarly attention. Furthermore, such analyses of the body of knowledge allow for determining major publication venues as well as identifying contributors including the underlying scholarly networks. With this paper a first comprehensive account of the evolution of topical directions inside the study domain is established. Also, leading contributors and influencers are named, and their networks and publication venues are identified. Over the past two decades the study domain of Disaster Information Management is found to be steadily growing in publication numbers as well as in research avenues

Information Sharing and Situational Awareness: Insights from the Cascadia Rising Exercise of June 2016

In a catastrophic incident gaining situational awareness (SA) is the foremost prerequisite that ena-bles responders to save and sustain lives, stabilize the incident, and protect the environment and property from further damage. However, catastrophes severely damage and disrupt critical infrastructures including response assets. Initially and for days and even weeks, essential information remains incomplete, unverified, and is changing as the catastrophic incident unfolds, all of which leads to a distorted common operating picture (COP). The lack of clear and comprehensive SA/COP prevents incident commanders from efficiently directing the response effort. This study reports on the challenges emergency responders faced with regard to situational awareness in a recent large-scale exercise under the name of Cascadia Rising 2016 (CR16) conducted in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The exercise involved a total of 23,000 active participants. Over four days in June of 2016, CR16 simulated the coordinated response to a rupture of the 800-mile Cascadia Subduction Zone resulting in a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami similar to the catastrophic incident in Eastern Japan in 2011. Responders at all levels were severely challenged, and the exercise revealed major vulnerabilities in critical infrastructures. Situational awareness was very difficult to establish. The exercise demonstrated that the challenges to SA/COP and to response management, in general, during catastrophic incidents cannot be regarded as a linear extension of non-catastrophic emergency and disaster responses. It rather requires the rethinking and revising of practices and procedures when responding under the constraints of massively degraded critical information infrastructures and harshly decimated assets

Smart cities and service integration

E-government advancements have not fully resolved the challenge of providing citizens with a single entry point for services that involve different government entities. The Smart Cities and Service Integration project (hereafter, SmartCities) aims to establish a framework for smart city service integration that would assist in the management of large scale projects related to the integration of services across governments. By using comparative case studies of six cities (New York City, Seattle, Quebec City, Mexico City, Macao, and Shanghai), the project aims to develop a theoretical framework to guide smart cities service integration. The project will highlight integration of public services and cross-boundary information sharing by focusing on specific policy domains. An additional goal of this project is to develop research capabilities of graduate students who participate in the research. The research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

E-government: A Special Case of ICT-enabled Business Process Change

The literature on Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has evolved into a strand of literature which studies organizational change (OC), and more specifically, Business Process Change (BPC), induced and enabled by Information and Communication Technology (ICT). With the unfolding of electronic government (e-government) changes to the way government works also seem to be imminent. Electronic government increasingly impacts business processes and workflows in the public sector. The BPC/ICT research, hence, has the capacity to directly inform both the research and practice of electronic government. In this paper, the findings of the BPC/ICT literature are reviewed and discussed regarding their applicability to electronic government. Both the theory and preliminary empirical evidence suggest that electronic government must be seen as a special case of ICT-enabled business process change

Electronic government: information management capacity, organizational capabilities, and the sourcing mix

The information systems-related sourcing literature currently emphasizes a portfolio approach combining homegrown, hybrid, and outsourced (contracted) systems. This study found similar approaches in the sourcing for electronic government (e-Government, e-Gov). E-Gov-related sourcing mixes potentially create high switching costs and path dependency. They may also severely impact governments' information management capacity and organizational capabilities. Further, e-Government leads to business process change, all of which necessitates an increased understanding of e-Gov-related sourcing and its integration with traditional public management information systems (PMIS). In the absence of an e-Gov-specific sourcing theory, this study explores current sourcing practices and uncovers overlaps in sourcing concepts and also significant differences between private and public sourcing practices. E-Gov sourcing portfolios were found not systematically managed potentially compromising the public information management capacity. To help public managers design and manage e-Gov sourcing mixes, the article proposes framework for e-Government sourcing for further testing

Smart Advisors in the Front Office: Designing employee-Empowering and Citizen-centric services

AbstractCivil servants in government front offices frequently lack subject matter expertise as well as necessary skills to meet modern citizen-centric service demands. Using design research, we discuss how front offices can change the service paradigm from administering government-centric and transaction-oriented services to providing truly citizen-centric services. We demonstrate that by means of “advisory information artifacts” civil servants can become expert advisors and eventually provide citizens with superior advisory services. Advisory information artifacts consist of a knowledge base, “counseling affordances” offering advisors moderation material and “service encounter thinkLets” covering the corresponding work practices. Such advisory information artifacts have the capacity to effectively support civil servants in acquiring the necessary advice-related skills while concurrently providing superior citizen-oriented services