USERS NEEDS FOR COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT IN

EMERGENCY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Teresa Onorati, Alessio Malizia, Paloma Díaz and Ignacio Aedo

Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Avda. de la Universidad 30, Leganés, Madrid, Spain

Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction, Emergency Information System, User Need, Computer Supported

Cooperative Work.

Abstract: The management of an emergency is a cooperative work that involves people from different areas and

different roles. In this paper, we describe an empirical study based on surveys and interviews that have been

done with users to study how to improve the collaborative functionalities of an existing system used for

cooperating and sharing resources among different Spanish Emergency Management governmental

agencies. The goal of the study was to understand how emergency workers cooperate in real emergencies

and the kind of tools they are actually using, as well as to identify potential strategies and technologies to

improve the level of computer-supported collaboration.

1 INTRODUCTION

Emergency management is an example of

collaborative work where participants could be

geographically distributed. Governmental and non-

governmental agencies from various nations share

resources to manage a crisis in the most efficient

way. Emergency workers can be subdivided in

professionals or volunteers with a specific level of

responsibility or role in the solution process and a

specific kind of expertise and experience.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work

(CSCW) might play an important role to coordinate

all the people and the resources involved in an

emergency. The scope of the management of an

emergency is to obtain an efficient solution of the

crisis, where efficient is referred to an optimal

organization of the activities to perform and the

resources to employ. To do this, a collaboration

system is needed to support effective information

sharing, decision making and communication

(Waugh, 2006).

Beyond technical characteristics, it is important

to consider psychological issues. In an emergency,

feelings and behaviours of involved people can be

different with respect to a normal situation. They are

worried about the solution process and they need to

work in a real-time full operating environment. In

this scenario, the efficacy of the collaboration relies

greatly on the ability to cope with the different ways

of thinking and acting of participants. For these

reasons, it is useful to interview emergency workers

to collect information about the management of an

emergency (e.g. a full description of different

stages). In this article, we elaborate the information

gathering process on interviews and surveys with

emergency workers in different Spanish agencies.

Our objective is to analyse aspects about the

relation between collaboration and emergency, like

tools and communication devices used and how

shared resources are managed. In next sections, we

start describing related works and then we present

our study about a possible characterization of

collaboration in emergency management. We

conducted an experiment with real users involved in

an emergency situation to understand their needs.

From these results, we eventually identify useful

collaborative tools, adapting the time/space matrix

(Dix et al., 2003, pp. 664-665) to the emergency

management case.

2 COLLABORATION AND

EMERGENCY

In these last years, many disasters, like the

Hurricane Katrina, showed the limits of existing

Onorati T., Malizia A., Díaz P. and Aedo I. (2009).

USERS NEEDS FOR COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT IN EMERGENCY INFORMATION SYSTEMS.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 48-54

DOI: 10.5220/0001984200480054

 SciTePress

emergency management systems. In (Waugh, 2006)

authors present an interesting analysis about phases

of the emergency management process. This

analysis is based on a real example in United States.

In general, a process to manage a crisis has: (1) to

prevent or mitigate the impact of the disaster; (2) to

prepare an emergency planning and training; (3) to

respond with some specific activities; (4) to restore

the situation with basic services.

In the past, all commands and controls were

structured in a hierarchical way with a top-down

approach, where few agencies were involved. Now,

authority is shared among many organizations,

responsibility is dispersed and resources are

scattered. This new scenario needs a more dynamic

and flexible network which could improve the

collaboration among emergency workers. The role

of collaboration is crucial to link all emergency

management agencies dealing with a crisis or a

potential catastrophic event. Moreover, all levels of

a management process require collaboration: for

example, local agencies need to create a trusted

relationship between volunteers and communities.

In literature, there are many contributions that

analyse how the collaboration can be improved in

case of emergency. Nevertheless, last disasters have

demonstrated that the most advanced information

systems are not enough to support the faster relief of

the affected populations. For this reason, researchers

in emergency management start to rethink the role

of information technology in emergency response.

The development of a system consists of the

following stages: design, development, usage and

evaluation (Van De Walle, 2007). Moreover, one

critical point for the emergency response is the time:

the access to the system must be very fast and

information must be always updated.

A relevant issue in emergency domain is that

individuals during an emergency situation are under

pressure: to absorb information rapidly, to judge its

meaning and relevance and to make effective

decisions about next actions. Based on these

considerations, in (Carver, 2007) authors presents

five important properties for emergency

management: people involved feels they are

exercising control; the focus of attention has to be

on the problem, ignoring all that is not relevant; the

improvisation is important to evaluate information

and to formulate decisions; senses of challenge,

curiosity, and enjoyment are important factors;

depending on the critical nature of the problem,

people feel more motivated to find a solution

without losing time.

Manoj and Hubenko-Baker in (Manoj, 2007)

identify and discuss technological, sociological, and

organizational challenges to establish an efficient

communication system during a crisis. The

communication is the first way to respond to a

disaster. Today, all local, state and federal agencies

use radios to share information: the usage of

orthogonal frequencies makes the communication

very difficult. Authors in their research identify

three categories of communication challenges:

technological, sociological and organizational.

These three factors guarantee an effective system to

communicate in case of emergency.

3 THE EXPERIMENT: USERS

NEEDS IN EMERGENCY

In this section, we describe the empirical study that

has been done with emergency workers, submitting

an on-line survey and a telephonic interview to a

group of emergency workers. Involved participants

have different profiles and roles in the emergency

management process. Moreover, collected

information is about: the usage of tools both in the

work place and at home, the individual worker

experience in the emergency management, the

collaboration among emergency workers and a real

participation to a crisis.

The information gathering process is organized

in two phases. In the first one, thirty-two emergency

workers and managers have been asked to fill a

questionnaire via web. Questionnaires were

anonymous and the privacy of collected information

was guaranteed. At the end of this first phase, we

have obtained eleven filled questionnaires. In the

second phase, the same questionnaire was used for

three telephonic interviews: in this case participants

had the possibility to give us additional comments to

questions proposed during the interview.

3.1 Participants

Participants to surveys and interviews were fourteen;

they were all emergency workers or managers of

agencies of Autonomous Communities and Cities

(governmental authorities of Spanish regions) and of

the central government.

We have chosen both professionals and

volunteers, grouped into two different categories: in

charge of Emergency and in charge of Command

Post. Five participants belonged to the first group

with different roles: area directors, responsible of

USERS NEEDS FOR COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT IN EMERGENCY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

information systems and director of coordination

room. The second group had nine participants, as

coordinators of operations and services, technical

experts, trainers and directors of command post.

These two categories group together all kinds of

employment in emergency management. It is a

classification related to the location: at the office or

at the command post. The emergency management

experience of chosen participants is greater than five

years: however six of them had less than ten years of

experience.

3.2 The Survey

The survey is organized into five sections as

summarized in Table 1. In general, the entire

questionnaire is about the relationship between

technologies, collaboration and emergency. The

objective is described at the beginning of the survey:

to know and to understand users’ functions and

roles during the resolution of an emergency, as well

as the influence of these roles when determining the

information each user requires and her

collaboration needs. The completion is

approximately twenty-five minutes.

Table 1: Questionnaire sections.

I. Experience with tools

II. Experience in emergency management as

professional and volunteer

III. Kind of tasks performed according to her role and

the emergency phase she is working at

IV. Features of the working place (physical and

organizational) and of the collaboration

V. Description of tasks and technology used in the last

participation in a real emergency

The first section of the questionnaire was about

experience with tools: the frequency of use at the

work place and at home. Considered tools were web

browsing, electronic mail, video conference, audio

conference, interactive maps and collaborative

instruments (e.g. shared database).

In the second section users answered questions

about their personal experience in emergency

management: type of employment, years of

experience in emergency management as

professional or volunteer and the emergency stage

where they are employed.

The third section consisted of four questions

related to functions and tasks performed during

emergency management. In particular, users have to

indicate job functions during an emergency

situation, participation in the negotiation and in the

delivery of resources of others agencies, tasks

performed during the reception and the donation of

resources.

Working place and collaboration during

emergency management was the topic of the fourth

section. Required information was about devices and

tools used to perform users’ activities, like

collaboration and communication to manage the

delegation and the authorization process.

The last part of the survey was about the

description of a real emergency participation. Users

have to describe the type of participation (as affected

or as supplier), the management of resources and the

employed devices in a real scenario.

3.3 Results

After collecting information gathering process,

results both from on-line surveys and telephonic

interviews have been analysed and compared to

study how technology is employed in the emergency

management. In this section we present the data

analysis with the questionnaire results.

The first result we present is the use of internet

and communication tools. Web browsing, interactive

maps and GPS have higher frequency of use than e-

mail and audio conference. Comparing the

frequency of interactive maps and paper maps, the

second ones have a lower use than the first ones:

interviewed emergency workers consider interactive

maps more comfortable and useful. An example is

GoogleMaps that provides detailed maps of the

entire world.

Results from the second section of the survey

give a classification of participants, depending on

various factors. Considering the role in the

emergency management process, we individuate two

classes: back-end people and front-end people.

Back-end people are ones directly in charge of

emergency that work in the back office. Front-end

people are the ones that work in the command post

and are in charge of managing the emergency in the

field. Depending on the number of years of

experience, five different groups have been

individuated. The most numerous one is composed

by people with twenty or more years of emergency

experience as professionals or volunteers. As shown

in (Waugh, 2006), the emergency management

stages are mitigation, planning, response and

recuperation. Depending on the stage of the

emergency management process, interviewed

emergency workers are mainly involved in the third

one: the emergency response.

From the third section of the questionnaire we

did not get any relevant results.

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Concerning the collaboration during the

emergency management, we obtained an interesting

result from the fourth part of the survey. Three

different kinds of communications have been

considered: face-to-face, by traditional devices and

by electronic devices. The Figure 1 is a graphic with

on the y axis the number of users that had chosen the

kind of communication on the x axis. Represented

values on the x axis are No to indicate users that do

not use the selected kind of communication, Yes for

ones that had not given a preference between to one

and to many, to one for collaboration between two

people and to many for collaboration among many

people. Looking at this graphic we can conclude that

multi-directional communications are mainly done

face-to-face. Traditional devices are used both

among two or more people. The use of electronic

devices is in any case rare limited to sending e-mails

to multiple users. Combining this information, we

can conclude that collaboration among many people

uses a face-to-face communication, instead

communication one to one uses traditional devices.

People: kind of communication

Face to Face By tradicional devices By electronic devices

Yes

to one

to many

Figure 1: Kind of Communication during Collaboration.

Tool experience for each emergency stage

0,00

1,00

2,00

3,00

4,00

5,00

6,00

Undefined Mitigation Planification Response Recuperation

web browsing

electronic mail

videoconference

audio conference

interactive maps

GPS

collaborative tools

Figure 2: Combing Tool experience and Emergency stage.

In the second phase of the analysis we combined

the tool experience with the emergency management

phases. In Figure 2 there is the relative graphic. In

this case on the y axis there is the mean frequency of

use for each tool and on the x axis the emergency

stage (mitigation, planning, response and

recuperation). The entry Undefined represents users

that do not indicate the stage. It is interesting to note

that web browsing and electronic mail are the most

used in each stage, but in mitigation and

recuperation they have the same frequency of GPS.

Collaborative tools are in particular used during

recuperation to coordinate all necessary operations.

Moreover, video conference is the least used tool in

all stages.

Table 2: Variance for results in Figure 2.

mitigation plan response recuperation

web

browsing

0 0,15 0,14 0

email 0 0,08 0,08 0

video

conference

0 0,33 0,56 0

audio

conference

1 2,06 2,10 0

interactive

maps

1 1,71 1,73 0

GPS 0 2,81 2,75 0

collaborative

tools

3 2,45 2,27 0

The Table 2 presents variances for means in

Figure 2 (the combination of tool experience with

the emergency management phases). This further

information is a way to capture the distribution

degree of the presented data set. In this particular

case, the lowest values are for web browsing,

electronic mail and videoconference. This means

that all interviewed users gave a similar evaluation

to these tools: high frequency for web browsing and

electronic mail, low frequency for videoconference.

In case of audio conference, interactive maps, GPS

and collaborative tools, there is a large gap among

users’ evaluation. The reason is that they are used by

a small group of participants with a high frequency,

in particular for GPS and collaborative tools.

Looking at the variance, we can deduce that these

tools can be useful in all emergency stages;

nevertheless further investigation is needed in order

to complete data analysis.

At the end of the combining analysis, some

conclusions can be drawn. Video conference and

collaborative tools have low frequency of use, due to

the age of users and not to the emergency stage.

Presumably, in the future people would be more

available to use advanced tools in domain like the

emergency management. At the same time, from a

technical point view, advanced technology for

collaboration system (e.g. video conference,

interactive maps and shared database) needs an

improvement to be most usable and easy to use.

USERS NEEDS FOR COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT IN EMERGENCY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

4 CHARACTERISTICS OF A

COLLABORATIVE SYSTEM

FOR EMERGENCY

A collaborative system can be categorized in several

ways. One of these, presented in (Dix, 2003), uses

information about where and when users collaborate.

To describe this approach a Time/Space matrix is

used (Table 3). The time axis is the y (rows) and the

space axis is the x (columns). For example, in case

of users available to collaborate at the same time and

geographically distributed (synchronous, remote),

they can use devices, like a telephone or a system

with an instant communication, like chat or video

conference.

Table 3: Time/space matrix.

Co-located Remote

Synchronous meeting rooms video conference

Asynchronous argumentation tool email

Results of the information gathering process

presented in the third section have shown a set of

useful tools in emergency management: combining

this information with the collaboration time/space

matrix, we have obtained the time/space matrix for

the domain of collaboration in emergency

management (see the table in Table 4).

Table 4: Time/space matrix in the emergency

management.

Co-located Remote

Synchronous

Face-to-Face

(multiple users)

Traditional Device (one

to one, multiple users)

Asynchronous

Electronic Device

(multiple users)

Looking at the time/space matrix for the

emergency management domain and at users needs,

it is possible to propose improvements to

collaboration for an emergency management

system. In particular, we proceeded analysing how

to improve both synchronous and asynchronous

communication.

In synchronous communication, users prefer

traditional devices: they do not feel comfortable

using new technologies, they are afraid and they do

not trust these devices. In (Van De Walle, 2007), the

importance of electronic devices is pinpointed: users

can take advantage of these technologies by using

advanced services, like video conference to

communicate remotely or interactive maps to find

out geographical information. The solution is to

design new devices easy to use and similar to

traditional ones but that can augment the capacity of

response. Depending on the kind of communication,

face-to-face or remote, we can identify possible

solutions.

If the communication is co-located and people

share the same environment, an interactive

whiteboard can be useful due to various aspects. An

interactive whiteboard allows workers interact with

a big display where all available information is

visualized and touch substitutes the mouse so that

interaction might be more natural. Let’s imagine a

flight having problems and calling the control tower

to communicate the kind of emergency; this fact

will raise a procedure for managing this specific

crisis. The crisis procedure will include an

emergency meeting involving all the crucial

professional figures collaborating in a control room

to solve the crisis. The control room could be

equipped with the whiteboard continuously

displaying the status of the emergency, the map of

the airport, aggregation points (for fire-fighters and

first aids), etc. Furthermore the possibility of

interacting with a touch sensitive board will help in

immediately manipulating the placement of

resources and aids over the airport map.

In the case of a remote and synchronous

communication, an interesting idea could be to use

an IP phone (integrated into a system using Voice

over IP technology). An IP phone is based on IP

technologies and it allows telephone calls to be

made over the internet (Figure 5). It has several

advantages, such as the high level of integration into

digital systems and the usage of Ids like e-mail ones.

An interesting utility in case of emergency

management systems could be the storing of calls to

extract various information with a voice recognizer

(intelligent logging). By intelligent logging we

mean the possibility of using data mining and

natural language processing techniques to

automatically analyse transcription of critical phone

calls and extract relevant information.

Figure 3: The Facial Expression Recognizer.

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The facial expression recognition system can

provide information about the emotional state of the

workers. In Figure 3 there is the output of the facial

expression recognizer, presented in (Cohen et al.,

2003). The output is a 7-components vector: each

value is a probability for the related emotion (happy,

sad, neutral, surprise, angry, disgust, fear). As shown

in (Carver, 2007), the feelings of each emergency

worker could influence the activities performed to

solve the crisis: we propose the use of facial

recognition to provide non conventional and

intelligent interfaces.

For example, in a normal situation, we could

assume that a manager in charge of first aids in case

of big disaster (e.g. a Civil Protection Manager),

would have to monitor many information. Thus, a

system operating in normal status will provide her

with many data about logistics (hospitals,

ambulances availabilities, fire-fighters), equipments

(units equipped for chemical crisis, nuclear crisis,

etc), communications (governmental phonebook,

faxes and relevant points of contact), etc. When a

crisis occurs, all this information could overload the

manager abilities. By using a face and emotion

recognition module, the system could adapt the

information presentation and functions to the

manager’s level of stress; in this way, the system

could present a map locating the relevant resources

(ambulances, hospitals, etc) providing a synthesised

view.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The relation between collaboration and emergency

management is a very interesting research area that

combines principles from Computer Supported

Cooperative Work (CSCW) and the domain of

emergency. In these last years, the emergency

management is gaining importance and relevance: in

fact, big crisis like Katrina, have highlighted the lack

of an effective system to prevent, manage and solve

this kind of situation. For this reason, the

collaboration in the emergency management is

fundamental both for communication between users

and for shared information and resources.

We have studied various approaches present in

literature on the domain of emergency management

systems that also provide information about

organization of emergency processes. To obtain

additional information about these main points, we

have analysed the involvement of real users. The

proposed questionnaire was, in particular, about the

communication tools used by emergency worker to

collaborate during the solution of an emergency.

From results of the conducted experiment and

considering the theory of the Computer Supported

Cooperative Work, we have adapted the time/space

matrix at the domain of emergency management.

Moreover and we have proposed possible solutions

to improve the collaboration in emergency

management system. Examples are the IP phone and

the whiteboard as devices, the facial expression

recognizer as an add-on of the system.

In conclusion, this work provides a proposal for

different technologies that an emergency

management system could provide to help the

collaboration between its users. Future works will be

to study the use of the proposed technologies in the

different phases of emergency management;

furthermore we believe that studying the use of non-

conventional interfaces could be of great help in the

systems supporting emergency control rooms.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partly funded by the UIA4SIGE

project (Ministry of Science and Innovation

TSI2007-60388).

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