Mind the Gap: The Growing Distance between Institutional and Technical Capabilities in Organizations Performing Critical Operations

Although there are many reasons to seek to augment the capacity of crisis management and response organizations with various forms of information technology (IT), it is not clear that they will be able to adapt organizationally or institutionally to make effective use of the new capabilities. The behavior of organizations responsible for large, complex and tightly coupled systems is already known to be very difficult to predict reliably, due to their complexity, coupling, and nonlinear interactions. Historically, they are subject to a range of pathologies that are difficult to predict, ranging from self-organizing disasters to rigid and insensitive response. IT intensive organizations add to this the potential for unprecedented incoherence of tasks and task monitoring, leading to possible displacement of the locus of administration or the dissipation of task responsibility in ways that are still poorly understood, and badly in need of further intensive study.