Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Negotiating the ‘ Trading Zone ’ . Creating a Shared Information Infrastructure in the Dutch Public Safety Sector

Abstract Our main concern in this article is whether nation-wide information technology (IT) infrastructures or systems in emergency response and disaster management are the solution to the communication problems the safety sector suffers from. It has been argued that implementing nation-wide IT systems will help to create shared cognition and situational awareness among relief workers. We put this claim to the test by presenting a case study on the introduction of ‘netcentric work’, an IT system-based platform aiming at the creation of situational awareness for professionals in the safety sector in the Netherlands. The outcome of our research is that the negotiation with relevant stakeholders by the Dutch government has lead to the emergence of several fragmented IT systems. It becomes clear that a top-down implementation strategy for a single nation-wide information system will fail because of the fragmentation of the Dutch safety sector it is supposed to be a solution to. As the US safety sector is at least as fragmented as its Dutch counterpart, this may serve as a caveat for the introduction of similar IT systems in the US.

[1]  C. Hood.  The Tools of Government , 1983 .

[2]  W. Orlikowski.  Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations , 2000 .

[3]  Louise K. Comfort,et al.  Inter-organizational coordination in extreme events: The World Trade Center attacks, September 11, 2001 , 2006 .

[4]  Jon Coaffee,et al.  The everyday resilience of the city , 2008 .

[5]  K. Provan,et al.  Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness , 2007 .

[6]  Leslie D. Lutz,et al.  Incident Command System as a Response Model within Emergency Operation Centers During Hurricane Rita , 2008 .

[7]  E. Schein.  Organizational Culture and Leadership , 1991 .

[8]  A. Berle.  The three faces of power , 1967 .

[9]  Neville A Stanton,et al.  Command and control in emergency services operations: a social network analysis , 2006, Ergonomics.

[10]  Chiehwen Ed Hsu,et al.  Towards Shared Situational Awareness and Actionable Knowledge - An Enhanced, Human-Centered Paradigm for Public Health Information System Design , 2010 .

[11]  Naim Kapucu,et al.  Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Interorganizational Coordination in Complex Environments of Disasters : The Evolution of Intergovernmental Disaster Response Systems , 2011 .

[12]  Kenneth E. Boulding,et al.  Three faces of power , 1989 .

[13]  Anthony E. Cawkell.  The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems , 2002, J. Documentation.

[14]  F. K. Boersma,et al.  Emergency response rooms in action: An ethnographic case-study in Amsterdam , 2009 .

[15]  D. S. Wright,et al.  Understanding Intergovernmental Relations , 1988 .

[16]  T. Pinch,et al.  The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other , 1984 .

[17]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[18]  Nitesh Bharosa,et al.  Challenges and obstacles in sharing and coordinating information during multi-agency disaster response: Propositions from field exercises , 2010, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[19]  Benjamin L. Schooley,et al.  Towards end-to-end government performance management: Case study of interorganizational information integration in emergency medical services (EMS) , 2007, Gov. Inf. Q..

[20]  Jerome Bracken,et al.  Measurements of Effectiveness for the Information-Age Navy: The Effects of Network-Centric Operations on Combat Outcomes , 2002 .

[21]  Diane Vaughan,et al.  The Rôle of the Organization in the Production of Techno-Scientific Knowledge , 1999 .

[22]  Jane Fedorowicz,et al.  The formation of inter-organizational information sharing networks in public safety: Cartographic insights on rational choice and institutional explanations , 2009, Inf. Polity.

[23]  Astrid Scholtens.  Controlled Collaboration in Disaster and Crisis Management in the Netherlands, History and Practice of an Overestimated and Underestimated Concept , 2008 .

[24]  Donald P. Moynihan,et al.  The Network Governance of Crisis Response: Case Studies of Incident Command Systems , 2009 .

[25]  Barbara Czarniawska,et al.  Travels of ideas. , 1996 .

[26]  David L. Johnson,et al.  Improved Situational Awareness in Emergency Management through Automated Data Analysis and Modeling , 2011 .

[27]  Evert Vedung,et al.  Policy instruments : Typologies and theories , 1998 .

[28]  Robert Dachs,et al.  Emergency Response , 2001, Science.

[29]  Mica R. Endsley,et al.  Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems , 1995, Hum. Factors.

[30]  Frederic Patricelli,et al.  Disaster Management: The Structure, Function, and Significance of Network-Centric Operations , 2008 .

[31]  Jane Fedorowicz,et al.  A collaborative network for first responders: Lessons from the CapWIN case , 2007, Gov. Inf. Q..

[32]  Nancy J. Cooke,et al.  Measuring team situation awareness in decentralized command and control environments , 2006, Ergonomics.

[33]  Deil S. Wright,et al.  Federalism, Intergovernmental Relations, and Intergovernmental Management: Historical Reflections and Conceptual Comparisons , 1990 .

[34]  Michael E. Gorman,et al.  A Framework for Strategic Network Design Assessment, Decision Making, and Moral Imagination , 2006 .

[35]  Matthew Fewell,et al.  Network-Centric Warfare-Its Nature and Modelling , 2003 .

[36]  Ben van Lier.  Luhmann ontmoet ‘the Matrix’: Uitwisselen en delen van informatie in netcentrische omgevingen , 2009 .

[37]  S. Lukes.  Power: A Radical View , 1974 .

[38]  David Mendonça,et al.  Collaborative adhocracies and mix-and-match technologies in emergency management , 2007, Commun. ACM.

[39]  C. Perrow.  : The Next Catastrophe , 2022 .

[40]  L. Comfort.  Crisis Management in Hindsight: Cognition, Communication, Coordination, and Control , 2007 .

[41]  B. Mark.  Organizational culture. , 1996, Annual review of nursing research.

[42]  Naim Kapucu,et al.  Examining Intergovernmental and Interorganizational Response to Catastrophic Disasters , 2010 .

[43]  Anthony M. Cresswell,et al.  Advances in multi-agency disaster management: Key elements in disaster research , 2010, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[44]  F. Fleurke,et al.  Approaches to Decentralization and Local Autonomy: A Critical Appraisal , 2004 .

[45]  Alethia H. Cook.  Towards an Emergency Response Report Card: Evaluating the Response to the I-35W Bridge Collapse , 2009 .

[46]  Linda Kiltz,et al.  Experimenting with GIS in Doing Damage Assessments: A Trial Run at Disaster City , 2011 .

[47]  Keith G. Provan,et al.  Do networks really work? A framework for evaluating public-sector organizational networks , 1999 .

[48]  Guy H. Walker,et al.  WESTT (workload, error, situational awareness, time and teamwork): an analytical prototyping system for command and control , 2008, Cognition, Technology & Work.