Improving Information Exchange in Disaster Response: Responder Behavior and the Effects of Organizational Design
Open AccessEffective disaster response is important for saving lives, minimizing suffering, and protecting property. Disaster responders depend on real-time (or near real-time) access to available information to make informed decisions. Organizational design is an important contributing factor in enabling information access, as decades of organizational research has shown. However, disaster response organizations are an extreme case: disasters bring significant amounts of uncertainty, dynamism, urgency and complexity that responders must manage and address. As a result, there is often limited a priori knowledge of what information is needed, where it will be needed, and where it will come from, which makes it difficult to design organizations for responders’ emergent information exchange needs. This thesis explores why and how responders exchange information in a disaster response organization and the collective impact of different design features on information exchange performance. Phase I describes and analyzes responders’ information exchange behavior during realistic disaster response exercises, including the type of information behavior employed, the motivations for information exchange, the exchange setting type, and the type of information exchanged by responders. Phase II constructs an agent-based model to explore how organizational design features, combined with responder information exchange behavior, impact the information exchange performance of a response organization. The findings largely validate that extant theory on organizational design, namely information processing system design can guide disaster response organization design. Common design features such as network structures, databases or technical systems, and meetings are sufficient to support effective information exchange in disaster response organizations. However, disaster response organizations require the “right” mix of information exchange features (formal and ad hoc) to accommodate various levels of uncertainty for different contexts. The findings highlight four important considerations for organizational design in the disaster response context: 1) the mix of information exchange behaviors is similar across disaster phases, suggesting that information-related design features can likely be consistent despite changes to organizational structures, 2) most information exchanged is explicit, suggesting that more response information can be codified into technical and non-technical information products, 3) most information exchange occurs in meetings, suggesting that they provide additional value for responders beyond simple information exchange, and 4) the “right” mix of information exchange design features depends on the “proximity” (or degrees of separation) of available information to need, suggesting there needs to be sufficient cross-functional linkages within the organizational design.
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