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Resilient Emergency Response: Supporting Flexibility and Improvisation in Collaborative Command and Control
Abstract
The focus of this chapter is the design and development of Information and Communication Technologies that support collaborative work and processes in command and control teams, more specifically, in joint emergency response operations. The unique contexts and varying circumstances of response operations have an impact on how collaborative work and interactions among commanders emerge, as well as on the extent to which Information and Communication Technologies are used. This emergence of response operations poses specific methodological complications and demands on how to study command and control teams, and also how to approach high-level design problems. The chapter demonstrates how such analysis can be performed. It presents a study of scenario-based role-playing simulation with professionals – emergency management commanders – as participants. The study documents the work practice of a team of commanders from the Swedish local and regional emergency response organizations responding jointly to an emergency, a medium size forest fire. The study also identifies areas and/or activities that may be enhanced by command and control tools. A combined set of bottom-up data driven and top-down methods – topical episode analysis, communicative roles, socio-metric status and communication modelling – are used to assess communication and interactions among the commanders. The findings indicate that the studied commanders used informal arrangements within the established formal command and control structures, and took informal functions and communicative roles across organizational and domain boundaries to handle diverse incidents and so called pseudo-problems. This identified adaptive and improvised behaviour of the commanders – and the team as whole – was identified as a critical characteristic for effective command and control work in joint response operations. Cross-domain and cross-organizational knowledge was found to be the most important feature of this type of capability to adapt and improvise. The study, further, highlights the significance of employing bottom-up, data driven methods for analysis of design and development processes, as well as important methodological challenges related to this type of analysis.
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