Disasters and emergencies are critical situations where there is a danger to people, infrastructure or the environment. They are characterized as natural disasters but also man-made disasters and... Show More

Disasters and emergencies are critical situations where there is a danger to people, infrastructure or the environment. They are characterized as natural disasters but also man-made disasters and conflicts. Support by information technology (IT) can help to prevent such kind of critical situations and to improve the management. IT can improve the coordination between the forces involved and can speed up processes by, for instance, facilitating situational awareness. However, at the same time, experiences indicate that the use of IT as an operational tool might imply an increased perception of complexity. This special issue is focused on the specific challenges and technical implications for IT in this environment, as well as on findings regarding research and development methodologies to create, to validate and to evaluate solutions. Articles target either approaches that focus on specific challenges like supporting the rescue and care of single persons or approaches that deal with broad IT support in crisis and continuity management. Both aspects are of great practical relevance, for example, in large-scale emergency situations when operations of different organizations and authorities quickly lead to a complex situation for individual actors and management positions.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of enterprises in Germany and more than 95% in the European Union. Given the recent increase of natural disasters and man-made crises and... Show More

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of enterprises in Germany and more than 95% in the European Union. Given the recent increase of natural disasters and man-made crises and emergencies, it seems an important economic goal to ascertain that SMEs are capable of maintaining their work, revenue and profit at an acceptable level. According to ISO 22301, business continuity management (BCM) is a holistic management process which identifies potential threats and their impact to an organization and serves as a framework to increase organizational resilience and response capabilities. Prior research identified that BCM is under-represented in SMEs and that their security level is partially in an uneconomical range. This article presents the analysis of interviews with 19 independent micro enterprises highlighting findings on their low crisis awareness, varying technical dependency, existing action strategies and communication strategies and proposing a categorization of micro enterprises as preventive technicians, data-intensive chains or pragmatic jumpers.

IT support for crisis and continuity management covers all stages from prevention through preparedness to response and recovery. The application of innovative technologies often implies the need for... Show More

IT support for crisis and continuity management covers all stages from prevention through preparedness to response and recovery. The application of innovative technologies often implies the need for structural and procedural changes for users and reliable assessment of future business opportunities for service and tool providers. Scenario-technique is a methodology to systematically assess possible future developments to derive conclusions for strategic planning. This methodology is adapted to the domain of self-preparedness and self-protection. This article contributes domain-specific influence factors which are identified by literature research and reflecting interview with all stakeholder groups. For each influence factor, projections are derived using different types of trend analysis and forecasting methods. Influence factors and projections build a knowledge-base which enables generation of scenarios as a fundament for strategic decisions to support crisis and continuity management.

Crisis communicators and journalists need stable structures to handle social media content in emergencies, but struggle with information overload. The usability of a tool intended to support... Show More

Crisis communicators and journalists need stable structures to handle social media content in emergencies, but struggle with information overload. The usability of a tool intended to support information gathering was investigated by conducting two usability tests (low- and high-fidelity prototypes) with journalists. The aims were to investigate how well the design reflected users' general mental models of emergency work, and how it responded to the specific requirements set by work in high-stress surroundings. Tests were conducted in a laboratory. Participants understood the main prototype concepts, but struggled with time-consuming tasks, for instance, those related to saving content or evaluating information quality. To provide good situation awareness - and to fit in with user expectations - a system should gather information from several social media outlets and allow for varying possible user modes. However, system designers need to carefully balance between including necessary features and avoiding tasks that require complex manual actions.