12/03/07: Nitesh Bharosa: Designing an architecture for adaptive information orchestration

Recent crisis management operations in London, Madrid and Schiphol have again underlined the problem of achieving quick situational awareness during ad-hoc crisis management operations. Exercises, such as the Bonfire in Amsterdam, reveal that current information systems used for crisis response are unable to adapt to the changing circumstances, making it difficult for decision-makers to collect and distribute real time and high quality information. The lack of adapvity not only endangers first responders during a crisis, it also overshadows opportunities to resolve a crisis before it escalates even more. In order to improve situational awareness, many researchers have advocated the use of advanced technology across multiple crisis management organizations. However, deploying such advanced technology in hierarchical crisis management organizations is proved to be a costly and long-term endeavor, as such organizations can be characterized by a low IT-readiness and high dependency on routines and procedures. Nevertheless, we still believe in the ability of advanced technology to enable more adaptive crisis response, by providing real time, accurate and reliable information during a crisis. However, we are convinced that solutions for the information problem cannot be solely based on advanced technology. Therefore, we opt for a broader, architectural approach towards the development of future crisis management systems, also taking into account the institutional environment and decision-making processes. Following a design science approach, our research aims to identify and evaluate the elements of an adaptive architecture, ultimately guiding the development of future information systems for crisis management.