"Given the dependencies of large global firms on suppliers and business partners in many locations around the world, it is unlikely that an organization will not at some point be disrupted, directly or indirectly, by some sort of crisis. "

Opening Statement

Crises of varying scope and magnitude affect various regions, industries, organizations, and individuals each year. Crises take many forms, from economic (recession), informational (theft of proprietary information), and physical (industrial accident), to personnel-related (strike), reputational (rumors), psychopathic (product tampering), or natural (hurricane). Given the dependencies of large global firms on suppliers and business partners in many locations around the world, it is unlikely that an organization will not at some point be disrupted, directly or indirectly, by some sort of crisis. But how can organizations prepare for crises, which by their nature are unpredictable, unexpected, and non-routine? Should they spend resources preparing, or should they merely respond as best as possible with available resources? There are varying opinions about the degree to which preparedness or improvisation is more effective during a crisis.

One element of crisis response that is particularly important to large-scale crises is information flow and network management. Because decision making is constrained by time urgency, it is critical to manage information flows such that updated crisis information flows vertically and horizontally among crisis response organizations in a rapid manner. Crisis responders face many information-related challenges, including information overload (e.g., too much information coming from too many different sources), information interference (e.g., information that has been omitted, delayed, filtered, or incorrectly processed by intermediate parties, rendering it useless), and reduced availability of communication channels. The huge amount of information that flows through existing channels, as well as the complexity of the situation and number of stakeholders involved, may lead to channel bottlenecks and information breakdown.

So how can organizations manage the flow of information for events that are non-routine and for which information is hard to gather? And what tools and technologies are best for disseminating crisis-related information to responders and victims? Opinions differ on the best tools and technologies for gathering and transmitting information during crises, with some arguing for well-developed crisis management systems adaptable to different crisis situations and others advocating the use of the most commonly available technologies, such as social media applications running on mobile phones.

In this issue, we explore various approaches to managing information challenges during crises and the role of IT in facilitating crisis response. Our authors also look at the benefits of crisis preparedness as well as the potential for improvisational structures to meet crisis response needs.

We begin with an article by Cutter Senior Consultant Catherine Szpindor, who discusses the importance of disaster preparedness. Szpindor takes the viewpoint that the problem with many crisis response efforts is that they are too unrehearsed. Companies may well have business continuity and disaster recovery plans, but too often these plans are outdated, unpracticed, and hard to follow, and, in the worst case, responders may not even be aware that the plans exist. Szpindor asserts that crisis preparedness planning, even when the exact nature of a future crisis is unknown, can go a long way toward minimizing disruptions from a crisis. She also discusses how various technologies -- such as emergency messaging systems (e.g., alarms, broadcasts, text alerts), social media, e-mail, and Web technology (e.g., corporate intranets) -- can be a part of a crisis preparedness strategy. In fact, Szpindor believes the very role of IT in crisis response is to be part of the preparedness phase: IT should partner with business units and deliver effective communication tools capable of disseminating targeted, real-time information updates in the case of a crisis.

In our next article, Gary Pan, professor of management at Singapore Management University, focuses less on crisis preparedness and more on ingenuity during a crisis. Pan argues that the nature of crises and the resultant information needs and stakeholders cannot be predicted in advance, but capable and agile IT departments and personnel can improvise to provide quick crisis management support. To illustrate his points, Pan discusses Singapore's role in the response to the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004-2005. In particular, he looks at Singapore's Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) and how it was able to quickly develop and deploy a crisis case management system that formed the foundation of the UN's crisis response center operations. Whereas Szpindor's article is focused on the very immediate need of informing individuals that a crisis has occurred, Pan's article focuses on the disaster response effort in the ensuing days and weeks after a crisis has occurred. The IT roles he discusses include the provision of an ad hoc infrastructure and the provision of a network of interorganizational IT experts. Pan then describes how this infrastructure and interorganizational network allow for the rapid development and deployment of IT solutions to aid in the informational processes involved in crisis response.

While the first two articles take a mostly positive perspective about the role that IT can play in crisis response, Jamison Day of the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University and Leiser Silva of the University of Houston look at the impediments to information flow during a crisis. Day and Silva compare information flow during crisis response to a traditional supply chain: in the case of disaster relief supply chains, government relief agencies as well as nonprofit organizations and private companies must work together to assess the needs of their consumers (i.e., the affected populations) and coordinate the provision of their products (i.e., disaster relief goods and services). As with a traditional supply chain, a breakdown at any point in the disaster response supply chain can negatively affect the entire response effort. Drawing largely on their analysis of the response of national, state, and local authorities to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the US, Day and Silva identify eight challenges of information flow that are the most likely culprits in the breakdown of a supply chain: inaccessibility to information, inconsistent data and information formats, inadequate stream of information, low information priority, source identification difficulty, storage media misalignment, unreliability of information, and unwillingness to transfer data or information to other organizations. An awareness of these impediments should be helpful to disaster recovery and business continuity planners.

One organization that has been effective in both crisis planning and preparedness and crisis response is the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center (EOC). In their article, authors Weidong Xia, Irma Becerra-Fernandez, and Jose Rocha of Florida International University and Arvind Gudi of Drexel University look at the importance of a crisis response center. Whereas Day and Silva view crisis response as following a supply chain model, Xia and his coauthors view crisis response as hinging on a central organization. And unlike the scenario we heard about in the Pan article, in which the center of response was formed after the tsunami hit, in the case of the Miami-Dade EOC, the center is permanent. The personnel may change, but the center itself is a coherent entity that stands ready to deal with any of the many potential disasters that could affect Florida, such as hurricanes, flooding, heat waves, droughts, and nuclear accidents. Depending on the scope of a disaster, the EOC may increase or decrease the number of personnel and resources devoted to the response effort. The authors note that these crisis responders tend to rely more on personal interactions for information exchange during crisis response than on systems. However, the systems play a central role in the crisis preparedness phase, where they are used to track the wind speeds and direction of tropical storms, provide snapshots of damages caused by flooding, track pre- and post-storm activities, and predict possible storm surges. Also, Xia et al. note the importance of the simulation drills used to familiarize personnel with the procedures they will have to follow in responding to a crisis. In this way, the authors illustrate an effective example of some of the principles Szpindor outlined in her article.

A common theme mentioned by all our authors is the importance of information gathering and distribution during crisis response. Our final article deals with this issue in depth. Using lessons learned from two simulation exercises conducted in New Zealand, authors Yasir Javed, Tony Norris, David Johnston, and Emma Hudson-Doyle, of Massey University and its Joint Centre for Disaster Research, explain the importance of team situation awareness -- that is, the degree to which responders have a shared understanding of the crisis environment and what needs to be done. Guided by New Zealand's Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS), the authors describe the information requirements for the five primary CIMS functions: Controller, Planning/Intelligence, Operations, Logistics, and Welfare. These information requirements would set the parameters for an emergency decision support system that could be used to coordinate national, regional, and local responders in the event of a large-scale disaster. As in the article by Xia and his coauthors, Javed et al. argue for the creation of emergency systems in advance, even if the exact nature, timing, and scope of a disaster cannot be predicted.

Collectively, the articles in this issue provide different perspectives on handling crises, with one dominant view being that regardless of the unique nature of each crisis, organizations should undertake crisis preparedness. The Szpindor, Xia et al., and Javed et al. articles all take the position that it is best to prepare in advance and have the systems and structure in place to handle crises. The alternative perspective is that one must improvise during crisis response, because each crisis is unique. Pan shows how IT can play a role in successful crisis response improvisation, whereas Day and Silva show what can go wrong during such improvisation. While the different authors' perspectives on crisis response vary, the important role played by systems is common to all of them.

We hope the articles in this issue will show you how IT can be used to inform stakeholders of a crisis situation, update responders about the environment, and coordinate different agencies, personnel, and resources in crisis response. After all, when a crisis hits, the organization you save may be your own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dorothy E. Leidner is the Randall W. and Sandra Ferguson Professor of Information Systems at Baylor University, where she is the Director of the PhD program in IS. She is a regular summer professor at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and has also held faculty positions at INSEAD, Southern Methodist University, and Texas Christian University. Dr. Leidner received her PhD in IS from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also received her MBA and BA (in Plan II). She has over 30 publications in prominent IS journals. Her research has received best paper awards from MIS Quarterly, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, Academy of Management OCIS Division, IS Senior Scholars, Decision Sciences Journal, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. Dr. Leidner has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including MIS Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Decision Sciences Journal, Decision Support Systems, and Data Base for Advances in Information Systems. She is currently a senior editor for MIS Quarterly Executive. Dr. Leidner can be reached at Dorothy_Leidner@baylor.edu.