Collaborative Research: Information Technology and Emergency Response Improvisation: An Investigation

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Each year, in the US, emergencies cast devastating impacts on the civil and technical infrastructure, resulting in loss of human life, social and economic disturbances, and environmental damage. Because incidents are all different, first responders improvise when plans do not readily address a situation, where plans refer to documents detailing rules, standard operating procedures, roles, and organizational structures or any agreed-upon courses of action. Despite the importance of improvisation to emergency response, there exists a lack of accumulated knowledge on emergency improvisation, thus at the practice level it becomes difficult to transfer improvisation knowledge and skills from veterans to novices who are in need of such knowledge. An inability to properly improvise creates risks of response operation delays, inefficient allocation of resources, insufficient protection of operational safety, and mismanagement of crisis information. This project will explore the role of information technology (IT) in enabling and supporting emergency response improvisation. It will also investigate how organizational attributes and task-environment factors moderate the effects of IT support on improvisation. Expected research findings will guide IT vendors to develop new tools that offer improved support on emergency improvisation; help the emergency response community create organizational strategies and practices that better leverage IT for improvisational purpose.This project will adopt and extend Activity Theory (AT), a framework that is often used to describe collective actions, to the emergency improvisation context – we term this Crisis Response AT (CRAT). We will center our study of improvisation on upper to mid range Emergency Operating Centers (EOC) where IT could play a role in supporting improvisation. To collect a rich account of emergency response improvisation, the PIs will conduct interviews and focus-group studies of emergency response managers. The PIs will analyze the collected qualitative data and uncover major issues of improvisation, which are expected to result in a better understanding of how IT can be best used to address individual issues of improvisation. Following the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework, in addition, the proposal will explore important organizational and task environment factors that may moderate, either support or hinder, the effect of IT on emergency response improvisation. An online survey will be used to collect data from EOCs nationwide and test hypotheses derived from the qualitative work and theory. Survey data will be analyzed using advanced statistical methods. Finally, the PIs will develop and distribute a toolkit to help EOC managers develop and evaluate IT initiatives that support improvisation. This toolkit will be validated by emergency practitioners.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.