Network Without Centre? A Case Study of an Organizational Network Responding to an Earthquake

Benini, Aldo

doi:10.1111/1468-5973.00097

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Organisations will pursue their own agendas, thereby generating both contradiction and complementarity. Communities will pursue their own, often parallel, routes to response and recovery and mitigation (Benini 1999;Loosemore and Hughes 2001;Palmer 2001;Prater and Wu 2002;Juratowitch et al 2003;Silberbauer 2003;Spillan 2003). All of these diverse players-individuals, local and community organisations, media, GROs, NGOs, government institutions and departments, emergency services, military and international organisations and agencies-come to a disaster with an equally diverse range of ideas, approaches, agendas and needs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organisations in Disaster

King

2006

Nat Hazards

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In the event of a disaster, communities become the targets of specialist organisations and a concentration of activities. The complex unstructured activities and routines of daily life are disrupted and even totally overwhelmed by a single catastrophic event that requires a redirection of priorities, resources and people to deal with all aspects of the disaster impact as rapidly as possible. The whole community must be mobilised to restore functions and meet needs, to return to the normality of the pre-disaster state. This latter purpose is least likely to be achieved, as the destroyed community can seldom rebuild to the same complex, but randomly haphazard state that existed before the disaster. The mobilisation of the whole community to the single purpose of recovery requires a high level of organisation. Response to a disaster demands that there be purposeful organisations ready to provide leadership and action. Emergency management is predicated for the existence of such purposeful organisations. However, while organisations are at the core of emergency management response and recovery, they are by no means simple or singular. Disaster generates a plethora of organisations, which interact with the community rather than simply organising disaster response. The community also organises itself, re-assigning priorities and using existing organisations and networks.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organisations in Disaster

King

2006

Nat Hazards

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“…See [7]; [8] and [9] for details of centralized coordination around a UN Agency. Recent publications have applied "organizational design" best practices to humanitarian relief, thought they focus on a specific country and study only the response phase, like [10] and [11].…”

Section: Overview Of Existing Modesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaboration Networks Involving Humanitarian Organisations – Particular Problems for a Particular Sector

Charles

Lauras

Tomasini

2010

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Abstract. There is no relief operation similar to another. Nature, number and incentives of stakeholders vary tremendously from one operation to another, and so do the collaboration modes. One thing is always true thought: for each disaster, collaboration networks are implemented on both global and local levels. Yet, lack of collaboration is often underlined as a major weakness of humanitarians. Practitioners have therefore recently focused on this issue in order to find improvement paths. This paper, using a review of existing academic literature as well as reports published by practitioners, illustrates how collaborative networks are designed in the humanitarian sector. A panorama of existing collaboration networks during and in-between relief operations is presented. Barriers and enablers to implement them are made explicit. Two frameworks are finally proposed to better understand collaboration modes at a local level on one hand, and collaboration protocols at a global level on the other hand.

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“…As opposed to other work areas such as the back office, the front office, or the shop floor, field operations have been found as far less structured (or even structurable) [18,6,41,44]. Field operations such as maintenance and repair work as well as emergency response operations also entail a high detail complexity.…”

Section: Organizational Characteristics Of Field Operations and Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current Practices in Field Force Automation: Decision Support and Information Management for the Field Force

Trentham

Scholl

2008

Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008)

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In the past, field operations have mostly been a stepchild of information and communication technology (ICT) enabled organizational overhaul and process re-design. Recently, increased technological (mobile wirelessly connected) capability, economic necessity, and new external factors (such as the higher frequency of large-scale emergencies, for example, of the magnitude of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the US) have raised interest in and commitment to on-site information management and to a drastically improved in-situ decision making capacity of field operations. Field force automation (FFA) techniques and process changes have been introduced in field operations of organizations in both the private and public sectors.This study seeks to establish a baseline of current FFA practices in both sectors. Among other areas, we explore, what the work-related and organizational specifics of field operations are, also with respect to ICTs, how process completion and efficiency are measured, and how effective FFA is with regard to information management. FFA, it appears is still in its infancy, and the full extent of potential efficiency and productivity gains might need more time to emerge. IntroductionOver the past decades, ICT has been utilized in back offices, front offices, and on the shop floor to improve process efficiencies and decision-making capabilities across all sectors and industries. Field operations, however, has remained far less ICTenabled than those other three areas. This area has only recently gained more attention regarding its potential for streamlining and decision support based on mobile ICT. FFA projects have been launched within field operations of organizations in various sectors.Primary drivers for launching FFA projects seem to fall into three categories: (1) curiosity regarding the promises of novel technology leading to experimentation with fully mobile wirelessly connected (FMWC) technologies and applications [12,15,35], (2) economic pressures to reduce field operations cost, drastically increase field force

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Network Without Centre? A Case Study of an Organizational Network Responding to an Earthquake

Cited by 28 publications

References 7 publications

Organisations in Disaster

Organisations in Disaster

Collaboration Networks Involving Humanitarian Organisations – Particular Problems for a Particular Sector

Current Practices in Field Force Automation: Decision Support and Information Management for the Field Force

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