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In crisis management, multi-organizations are involved to deal with the events; however these services encounter several problems that make the transversal communication and information sharing very hard, with an ineffective mutual awareness during crisis response. Whereas, among the factors for crisis management success, figures prominently mutual awareness and awareness information, this requires effective interaction of the relevant information between emergency actors. But in the reality this communication is ineffective and influences the decision making. Thus, to support emergency response, enhance "awareness information" and transversal communication between different emergency actors, our contribution in this paper is to understand the organizations involved in emergency response and analyse the communication between actors. Thus we study at first, the vertical and the transversal communication in inter/intra emergency organizations. Second, we highlight and analyse the root causes of communication problems that actors encounter in operating level. Third, we classify by category the major information needed in emergency response and finally, we present the dependency between awareness information and actions achievement.

Emergency responders require maintaining awareness of the relevant information, in order to collaborate and achieve their activities successfully. However, the multitude organizations involved in crisis response are faced with many challenges and boundaries such as culture, terminology, objectives and priorities. All of this hampers the coordination and communication of the different information requirements for each particular need within inter-organizational collaboration. As result, this leads to issues in awareness, decision making and carrying out activities in addition to the loss of time. Hence, awareness is an important factor for crisis response success. This prompted us to ask the original question: How to pick up the needed and the relevant information about what is going around us to integrate and achieve our activity? In this paper, we present: (1) the results of this study on awareness issues, causes and effects in Inter-Organizational Collaboration in Crisis Management (2) We describe a semi structured system approach supporting Information Awareness, this approach help the different actors to pick up the needed and the relevant information about what is going around them to coordinate, integrate and achieve their activities.

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