Information Systems Frontiers
Inter-organizational disaster response requires collaboration among geographically distributed public and private organizations to enable a rapid and effective response to an unexpected event. In order to ensure coherent coordination among the responding organizations, relevant information needs to be collected from multiple sources, verified for accuracy, and shared with appropriate responding organizations, all within a short time frame. As a disaster situation unfolds, multiple aspects of disaster response continuously change, including urgency, scope, impact, the types of appropriate responders, and the responders’ needs for information and communication. These changes add to the complexity and uncertainty.
Unfortunately, recent response experiences and evaluations of disaster responders suggest that many disaster management systems often fall short of the capability to cope with the complexity and uncertainty. The majority of current information systems for disaster response have been designed based on probable scenarios, and optimized for intra-organizational response and routine processes. Therefore, such systems cannot adequately adapt to a constantly changing situation that often deviates from the design-time scenario by far.
Due to scarce resources, it is infeasible to develop information systems for each and every conceivable disaster situation. Consequently, recent interdisciplinary research efforts have focused on developing the ability to facilitate the ever-changing information needs under the complex and unpredictable environments. Within the area of disaster and crisis management, a large number of technological innovations have realized over the last couple of years.
Often these technologies have been developed in isolation of the other developments and have not been integrated into the daily routine operations of first responders, which might prevent effective use of the technologies during an emergency. Many cultural, organizational, jurisdictional and legal barriers also hamper or prevent necessary and proper coordination of relevant public and private organizations during unexpected events. Nevertheless, all these technologies and advances together provide the foundations of a unique platform that becomes a key to our ability to effectively respond to unpredictable and complex situations.
This special issue of ISF aims to compile the advances surrounding the emerging issues of inter-organizational disaster management andcontribute to the creation of a common body of knowledge to the multi-disciplinary field of study.
Topics
We solicit for papers showing innovative solutions, theoretical developments, or insightful experiences that can contribute to the foundations for the interdisciplinary research area. The topics include, but are not limited to:
· Innovative application of technologies
· Secure infrastructure for distributed data sources
· Adaptive, flexible and responsive information architectures
· Information quality and information sharing
· Information processing of large amounts of data
· Alignment of organizational and technical issues
· Network centric operations and information architecture
· Inter-organizational collaboration
· Decision-support systems and expert systems
· Case studies, lessons learned, and best practices
· Service-oriented architectures, orchestration, and semantic web
· Modelling, gaming and simulation of disasters
Special issue editors
Marijn Janssen, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
M.F.W.H.A.Janssen@tudelft.nl
JinKyu Lee, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, USA
jinkyu_lee@hotmail.com
Nitesh Bharosa, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
N.bharosa@tudelft.nl
Anthony Cresswell, Administration & Policy Studies, University at Albany, The State University of NY, USA
tcresswell@ctg.albany.edu
Important Dates
Prospective authors are encourages to submit an abstract or concept for appropriateness.
Submission Deadline: June 1, 2008
Notification of First Round Reviews: September 15, 2008
Revised Manuscripts Due: November 15, 2008
Final Acceptance Notification: January 15, 2009
Publication: Mid 2009