Benedikt Ley, Volkmar Pipek, Christian Reuter, Torben Wiedenhoefer

CHI 2012

This paper investigates improvisation in emergency response. They claim that their study revealed a lot of improvisational actions (pg 1535) and that many emergency response actions are collaborative (pg. 1535). In the introduction they ask some rhetorical questions:

But what is the exact nature of improvisation work necessary in crisis response? Where do Communication strategies fail? And how can we provide IT support for improvisation at an inter-organizational level?  (pg. 1530)

They attempt to answer some of these, but they only really answer the last one in a small way.

Improvisation

In the background, they cite many papers about the occurrence and the necessity of improvisation. The authors claim “improvisation becomes necessary when beforehand planned decision-making does not work for any reason. This is especially the case in crises.”(pg. 1530) They quote Mendonca and Wallace (2007), “Decision makers in emergencies must be prepared to improvise.”(pg 1530) In a series of citations, they claim that improvisation adds efficiency and nimbleness and that it should be supported:

Improvisation does not consist of more sophisticated methods of more structured systems (Cibborra, 1996). Instead of trying to eradicate it through automation, the appreciation of flexibility and effectiveness seems more adequate. There “improvisation and preparedness go hand in hand” (Mendonca, Jefferson, and Harrald, 2007): Without improvisation, emergency management loses flexibility, without preparedness, emergency management loses efficiency. (pg. 1530)

Relationships

The authors talk about the personal usage of technology such as smartphones to get information and to resolve information, and that this was sometimes necessary because they needed information, but their organizations didn’t provide such technology (this begs the question as to what has changed).

WIth regards to the formal and informal communication, they claim that both are important because of issues like technology failure, which they later use as part of their argument against centralization. When people, especially like EOC representatives are not available, then the need for this decentralization is critical. This could be really important for shiftwork.

Trust

Trust (Trustworthiness as they refer to it) is also an issue in the paper. Here they emphasize goo relationships and the ability to verify information through these. (pg. 1534) They say: “Because of the need for good relationships a lot of informal contacts  and relationships have been established alongside predefined communication lines.

Emergent Teams and Decision Making

In one of the more interesting sections of the background, they talk about the process of decision making with more than one person turning into a ‘muddling-through’ process, which is suggested in (Lindblom, 1959). Sidenote: I wonder what this means for collaboration and design? Is this similar to why design-by-committee things end up so terribly? Back to the paper, they cite a paper describing the emergent nature of teams in emergency response (Turoff, Van de Walle, Hiltz; 2010).

Synthesis

So they touch on the personal relationships as well as the importance of adaptation in effective work, but then they go back to supporting this in IT infrastructure (1536). One of the key points they touch on is the issue of redundancy and centralization of information. While I don’t necessarily think this is a terrible idea to have things in a central location, it also needs to be somewhere else, and be easy to find. This is sort of the crux of the situation. With cloud systems, especially in the case of the UW EOC one, they are still dependent on UW NetID authentication, which if a major earthquake hits and their servers are out, then their system is unreachable for all of them. The same is true of many of these systems. If there’s a few major fiber cuts, how will things work?

Their focus on the informal mostly relates to volunteer organization in Siegen-Wittgenstein than the more populated Rhein-Erft, but they also mention information failure and outdated lists. They state that actors should be able to readily choose which type of communication channel to use, and the structural knowledge of what a person does is important. They also state how important the personal relationships are.

They stop short of making cohesive suggestions about the IT infrastructure, and about the reasoning for why these are important. They’re also fairly schizophrenic about whether information should be centralized or not.