Are we prepared? Experiences from developing dashboards for disaster preparation

Relief agency managers show growing interest in dashboards for assessing multi-agency disaster preparedness. Yet, there is a dearth of research on the development and use of dashboards for disaster preparation. Consequently, information system architects in the disaster management domain have little guidance in developing dashboards. Here, dashboards refer to digitalized visualizations of performance indicators. In this paper, we discuss the experiences gained from an action research project on the development of dashboards for assessing disaster preparedness. The objective of this paper is to discuss experiences and tradeoffs extracted from the development of dashboards in practice. We organized a two-day gaming-simulation with relief agency managers for the evaluation of the dashboards. While the relief agency managers acknowledged the usefulness of dashboards in the disaster preparation process and expressed their intention to use these in practice, they suggested that the formulation and clustering of performance indicators requires further research.