How to Pick up the Needed Information about What Is Going Around Us: Information Awareness in Crisis Management

Abstract

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.