Information management in a crisis is difficult because of the inherent uncertainty surrounding events, their implications and potential outcomes; besides, organisations and collectives often behave in ways that further complicate that inherent difficulty, or at least fail to operate in ways that minimise uncertainty and establish a robust and defensible evidence base for decision making.
Effective and timely decision-making is critical in emergency and crisis management. To be effective, decision-making requires that the best possible information is gathered, assessed and analysed to provide an understanding of what is happening, why it matters and what might happen. That understanding is the basis for deciding what actions are required to realise the desired end state. Crises and emergencies are however characterised by uncertainty; there might be very little information available or there might be too much to process, what is available might be from a dubious source, information from different sources will often conflict, evidence might be highly technical, fast changing or ambiguous, and the collective effect of this can undermine even confident and highly competent decision makers.
Crisis decision makers working in an organisation of any size do not, or should not, operate in isolation; they should be supported in various ways, and one of the most critical decision support functions is information management. Information management is a tricky business though.
This is a digest of a 49-page paper from the Emergency Planning College, run by the contractor Serco for the Cabinet Office – titled Information Management for Shared Situational Awareness: Ideas, tools and Good Practice in Multi-Agency Crisis and Emergency Management. It’s by Dr Robert MacFarlane and Mark Leigh – for the paper in full visit the college website.
The North Yorkshire-based college has also brought out its 2015 course dates – which include new courses – Recovering From CBRN, Working in Event Control Rooms and Strategic Risk Workshop.
