An assessment of inter-organizational information management in initial disaster relief operations: Existence and causes of communication breakdowns.

摘要

During disaster relief operations, collaborative critical decisions are often made by decision-makers from many different organizations and from a diversity of professional fields. Very often, these collective decisions are made by teams of people separated by great distances, with differing goals and values, who have never before worked together.; Communication breakdowns often hamper the effective coordination of a disaster response, particularly when a multiplicity of Federal, state, local and volunteer organizations take part in the the effort. A communication breakdown is defined as the failure to communicate information due to (1) the inability to obtain critical and needed information, and (2) the inability to obtain sufficient information quality to support decision-making. The inability of response organization to adequately coordinate information among the response agencies creates problems for communities struggling to recover from a disaster.; This research investigated the causes affecting communication breakdowns in past disaster responses. It also investigated critical factors and functions that comprise disaster relief operations. The research used these factors and functions in the development of a multi-attribute computer based model for prioritizing types of information and quality of data required to support decision-making within and among the response organizations. The model was based on an Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP), was developed focusing on the first 72 hours of a response, and was used to elicit expert judgements from successful disaster response professionals. The model, based on AHP, provided a method for comparing the importance types of information and the requirements for quality during the first 72 hours of disaster relief operations. Questionnaires, developed based on the model, were used to elicited expert judgement to disaster response professionals. The results from acquisition of expert opinions demonstrate that the communication breakdowns that occur within and among disaster response organizations are often caused by characteristics that are organizationally dependent.