Knowledge Management in Civil Protection at the Example of Fire
Brigades
Andreas Schultz
a
, Fabian Dotzki
b
and Iryna Mozgova
c
Data Management in Mechanical Engineering, Faculty for Mechanical Engineering, Paderborn University, Germany
Keywords:
Knowledge Management, Civil Protection, Systematic Literature Review, Fire Brigade.
Abstract:
Knowledge management is essential for successful disaster management. This paper conducts a Systematic
Literature Review at the intersection of the knowledge management field and disaster management and ex-
amines the available body of literature. Fire departments are chosen as the focus group as they are the most
prevalent emergency services. There are many publications that deal with knowledge management during the
response phase of an emergency. Often, the literature focuses on the application of knowledge management
in large-scale disasters to link the various organizations on-scene. What is missing in most approaches is a
prior step of implementing and training the knowledge management system. Therefore, this literature review
seeks to provide an overview of approaches for daily routines and small-to-medium incidents that serve as a
training ground. However, literature on non-incident phases and smaller incidents is scarce. As information
technologies are developing rapidly, there is no modern and recent description of the current use of knowledge
management solutions in this area.
1 INTRODUCTION
Growing administrative regulations, new high-tech
equipment and changing environmental circum-
stances constantly increase the necessary information
and knowledge that civil protection personnel need
to know (Schultz et al., 2024b), (Weidinger et al.,
2021). This knowledge about processes, techniques
and equipment has to be stored adaptively so that it
is easy to learn new things, refresh familiar ones and
be aware of changes (Oktari et al., 2020). Existing
knowledge is rarely stored in a structured way, so new
or promoted civil protection members have to retrieve
information from their experienced colleagues or doc-
uments (Schultz et al., 2024b). It is rarely possible
to inform oneself or look up information from one
central source. These circumstances were the trig-
ger for the examination of the existing literature body
concerning knowledge management (KM) solutions
within civil protection (CP) by performing a System-
atic Literature Review (SLR), according to (Xiao and
Watson, 2017). This paper focuses on fire depart-
ments as one of the most widespread emergency ser-
a
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0213-1663
b
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-8940-0497
c
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6761-0220
vices (Brushlinsky et al., 2019). The remaining paper
is structured as follows: Chapter 2 contains a brief in-
troduction to the fields of CP and KM, followed by
a discussion on the application of KM within CP and
its characteristics and particularities. Chapter 3 de-
scribes the application of the SLR. The organizational
aspects are outlined and then categories are derived
into which the resulting publications can be classified.
Chapter 4 discusses the findings from the SLR in de-
tail and identifies the research gaps. Chapter 5 con-
cludes the work, gives a summarizing statement and
outlines subsequent steps.
2 FOUNDATION
The preface gives a brief overview of the theoreti-
cal principles of information and knowledge manage-
ment in section 2.1. The heterogeneity of CP systems
is presented in section 2.2 in order to illustrate differ-
ences between countries or regional authorities. Sec-
tion 2.3 links the two topics KM and fire brigades and
outlines the characteristics of KM applied in the struc-
tures of fire brigades.
256
Schultz, A., Dotzki, F. and Mozgova, I.
Knowledge Management in Civil Protection at the Example of Fire Brigades.
DOI: 10.5220/0012947700003838
Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2024) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 256-264
ISBN: 978-989-758-716-0; ISSN: 2184-3228
Proceedings Copyright © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

2.1 Knowledge Management
KM is a key success factor and a necessity of many
businesses due to the increasing knowledge bases,
the need for a competitive advantage or internation-
alization and managing of e.g. staff turnover (In-
ternational Organization for Standardization, 2018),
(Omerzel and Gulev, 2011). The ISO norm 30401 de-
scribes KM as follows: “Knowledge management is
a holistic approach to improve learning and effective-
ness through optimization of the use of knowledge,
in order to create value for the organization. Knowl-
edge management supports existing process and de-
velopment strategies” (International Organization for
Standardization, 2018). Most literature related to KM
uses the building blocks of knowledge management
by (Probst et al., 2012) as a basis for describing KM
processes (e.g. (North, 2021), (Oliveira and Pin-
heiro, 2021)). The building blocks by North consist
of six key components: Knowledge identification, ac-
quisition, development, distribution, utilization, and
preservation.
The Association of German Engineers (Verein
Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI)) has issued a guide-
line for KM in the engineering sector that describes
the basic concepts in VDI-5610:2009 (VDI Verein
Deutscher Ingenieure e.V., 2009). The guideline
aims at advising businesses on introducing a knowl-
edge management system (KMS) and distinguishes
the terms data, information and knowledge as con-
cepts that build on each other. Two different types
of knowledge are differentiated: implicit and explicit
knowledge. Implicit knowledge is “bound to persons,
difficult to communicate and hardly to formalize”,
whereas explicit knowledge “can be formalized on
different levels (e.g. speech, writing); it is therefore
communicable and storable in various media” (Inter-
national Organization for Standardization, 2018). The
process of KM in (VDI Verein Deutscher Ingenieure
e.V., 2009) (depicted in Figure 1) corresponds with
the building blocks described by (Probst et al., 2012).
Figure 1: Knowledge management process according to
(VDI Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e.V., 2009).
In summary, it can be stated that the presented sci-
entific foundations (North, 2021), and (Probst et al.,
2012) have their origin in organizational and espe-
cially business-oriented research domains. They still
form the scientific basis for KM in recent litera-
ture. Also the presented norms (International Orga-
nization for Standardization, 2018) and (VDI Verein
Deutscher Ingenieure e.V., 2009) focus on fostering
KM in businesses. Nevertheless, these concepts are
versatile and are being used in other areas as business-
oriented KM as well.
2.2 Civil Protection
CP is used as a summary for all activities that aim
at protecting people in a certain area from natural
(e.g., earthquake, drought flood or hurricane) or man-
made (e.g., technical failure, terror) hazards (Waugh
and Tierney, 2007). Among others the following
organizations comprise the CP: emergency services
(fire brigades, emergency medical response/ ambu-
lance, and police), public administration (municipal,
region/county/provincial/national etc.) and also tech-
nical/scientific services (Waugh and Tierney, 2007).
It is organized differently from country to country
(cf. (Alexander, 2010) and (Zambrini et al., 2020))
and thus structures and prerequisites differ. Setting
the focus on fire brigades, many countries maintain
a system with mostly professional (paid) firefight-
ers, such as Italy or Great Britain (Alexander, 2010).
On the contrary, Germany, Austria or Switzerland
and other Western European countries like Poland or
the Netherlands, among others, maintain a firefight-
ing system that heavily relies on volunteer firefight-
ers (whereas professional firefighters are also present,
mostly in bigger cities) (Brushlinsky et al., 2019),
(Zambrini et al., 2020). The procedure of CP or-
ganizations can be categorized into different phases
related to the central disaster. The disaster manage-
ment circle (Inan et al., 2018) (Haddow et al., 2021)
is used in multiple variations whereas the core steps
are always similar: Prevention, Preparedness, (Disas-
ter/Impact), Response and Rehabilitation. The transi-
tion between two phases is not necessarily a certain
point but rather a gradual change.
The tasks of the various CP organizations are di-
verse. As mentioned at the beginning of this sec-
tion, they can be categorized into emergency ser-
vices, public administration and technical/scientific
services. Each of them has its own field of responsi-
bility, which may vary across borders. But all of them
need to evolve and have to adapt to new technologies
and procedures.
In recent years, various IT-solutions have been de-
veloped to support emergency operations. The ex-
amined technologies range from technical solutions
such as drones and exoskeletons (Gottschalk, 2019),
emergency response information systems (Weidinger
Knowledge Management in Civil Protection at the Example of Fire Brigades
257

et al., 2021) to the digital interconnection of units with
the help of IT (Spaling et al., 2018). The introduc-
tion of new technologies is also linked to the need to
adapt existing procedures to new circumstances. This
may lead to challenges, that emergency responders
face while using IT in incidents and are presented by
Elmasllari who identifies twelve problems that arise
when using IT for disaster management (Elmasllari,
2018) which are excerpted below:
• Reliability: Digital systems have to function when
they are used in an emergency.
• Interoperability: IT-based tools must be able to
exchange data and information with other systems
and thus provide interfaces for import and export.
The usage of IT restricts the user to the means of
communication provided by the system.
• The price of structured data: Data, information
and knowledge that should be stored in a system
need to be expressible and explicit to be able to
store it in a digital system. The graphical user in-
terface limits the possibilities to those intended by
the programmers.
2.3 Knowledge Management in Civil
Protection
This section combines the two aforementioned top-
ics KM and CP and outlines the particularities of
KM in CP. As already mentioned in Section 2.1, all
of the KM concepts and the norms ISO 30401 and
VDI 5610 focus on the operational context of en-
terprises. The special character of (volunteer) CP is
not reflected directly in the KM concepts (Lee et al.,
2011). In addition, the mostly volunteer staff often
does not have the time and money (as companies do)
to deal with KM and implement it as a business strat-
egy (Oliveira and Pinheiro, 2019), (Alexander, 2010).
This leads to an underrepresented usage of KM in
CP while the tools and techniques do exist for en-
terprises. Furthermore, the amount of knowledge re-
quired for successful disaster management is already
enormous and vast, yet much of it is tacit and drawn
as expertise from previous experience (Oliveira and
Pinheiro, 2019), (Oktari et al., 2020) (Klein, 2017).
CP organizations are moreover mostly run or orga-
nized by the state or public bodies, which are not run
as businesses with a profit intention but are funded
by the taxes allocated to them (Waugh and Tierney,
2007). This is not necessarily a downside, as there
is hardly any competitive situation among two units
(Omerzel and Gulev, 2011); the willingness to col-
laborate across unit borders is way higher than it is
among companies (Schultz et al., 2024b). The partic-
ularities of KM in CP compared to the enterprise con-
text is, among others, the following: The knowledge
has to be available more or less immediately in crisis
situation since the disaster and its effects do not allow
any delay (Elmasllari, 2018). Furthermore, the need
to share knowledge between units is greater than be-
tween companies. Therefore, specific requisites must
be elaborated for KM systems which shall be used for
emergency services that respond to an event.
There are already several digital solutions to sup-
port one or another dimension of knowledge. In-
formation Management Systems (IMS) are used as
administrative support systems for keeping track of
incident reports, personal member data and equip-
ment history (Schultz et al., 2024b). KMS are de-
fined as a part of management systems related to
knowledge (International Organization for Standard-
ization, 2018) and are rarely used in CP (Schultz et al.,
2024b). There are only few documentations about
the implementation and usage. Two German exam-
ples are the Einsatzleiterwiki
1
(incident commander
wiki) or the web-based portal BKS-Portal
2
for CP
personnel in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The
first one provides basic information sorted by key-
words or alarm patterns, whereas the latter serves in
the state of Rhineland-Palatinate as a central platform
for exchanging information and knowledge. Another
approach describes the implementation of a KM in-
frastructure in New South Wales, Australia (Pickles,
2004). It is implemented by a content management
system for managing web-content and e.g. a docu-
ment management system. The application of KM in
CP has been a research topic for many years as the
existing literature reviews show (Fauzi et al., 2024),
(Anand et al., 2022), (Oktari et al., 2020), and (Do-
rasamy et al., 2013). Nevertheless, the implementa-
tion of successful KMS is still a topic of ongoing re-
search and development. The fire brigades have an
important role in the CP ecosystem as they are in-
volved in large scale disasters as well as small and
daily occurring incidents (Weidinger, 2022), (Kapalo
et al., 2019) and are usually among the first organi-
zations on-scene. Which leads to the intention of this
paper to examine the literature available with a spe-
cial focus on fire brigades and identify research needs
and gaps in the literature body.
1
https://einsatzleiterwiki.de/
2
https://bks-portal.rlp.de/
KMIS 2024 - 16th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems
258

3 SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE
REVIEW
The process of the SLR, as proposed by (Xiao and
Watson, 2017), aims to capture and evaluate the cur-
rent status of a certain research field. It consists
of eight stages, which are grouped into the follow-
ing three phases: Planning, conducting and report-
ing. The literature review process can be partially
performed iteratively in order to deal with unforeseen
issues and to amend the search with extended key-
words. The remainder of this chapter is structured
following the SLR process proposal and depicted in
Figure 2.
Figure 2: Systematic Literature Review process based on
(Xiao and Watson, 2017).
3.1 Formulate the Research Problem
As mentioned before, the literature body concerning
KM in CP, and in particular in the fire brigades, is
not very mature and scattered. There are many pub-
lications on KM in business environments. A decent
amount of publications focus on KM in CP but the
focus is mostly on large-scale disasters like earth-
quakes, floods, etc. These few existing publications
(e.g., (Inan et al., 2018), (Pickles, 2004) and other
literature reviews (Fauzi et al., 2024), (Anand et al.,
2022), (Oktari et al., 2020), and (Dorasamy et al.,
2013)) mostly deal with one or several phases of the
disaster management circle, examining the applica-
tion of KM, e.g., in the response phase. The ap-
plication and examination of KM in this article not
only focuses on the typical disaster management cir-
cle phases but is extended to include supporting tasks
that members of disaster management organizations
perform like training, administrative work and other
processes that can be supported by a KMS (Schultz
et al., 2024b). This is intended to improve the attitude
and capability of users of KMS to be able to handle a
KMS during an incident in a timely and serious envi-
ronment and not be overwhelmed by the additional IT
system (Weidinger et al., 2021), (Elmasllari, 2018).
3.2 Develop and Validate the Review
Protocol
Therefore, this literature review focuses on applica-
tions of KM in fire brigades. The literature should be
analyzed with regards to the different disaster phases
and solutions that might be applicable in daily rou-
tines as well. Differing prerequisites and require-
ments by professional and voluntary firefighters (c.f.,
(Alexander, 2010)) should be considered. For ex-
ample, voluntary firefighters have a primary job and
training, exercises, and administration take place in
their free time. The research is driven by the follow-
ing research questions (RQ):
• Which literature is available concerning knowl-
edge management within civil protection (focus-
ing on fire brigades) and to which phases of
the disaster management circle does it refer to?
(RQ1)
• How is the implementation and training of knowl-
edge management systems performed, are there
differences between professional and voluntary
personnel, and is knowledge management applied
in daily routines (non-incident times)? (RQ2)
• What digital knowledge management systems ex-
ist that are being used in civil protection? (RQ3)
The SLR is conducted as a desk study with the
four-eyes principle by two researchers to minimize
personal bias. Only online sources in English or Ger-
man are included in the literature list. The search was
performed during February and April 2023, with an
update search shortly before submission in May 2024.
3.3 Search the Literature
Google Scholar
3
and Scopus
4
were used as the initial
sources for publications by applying different combi-
nations of search strings. The search was also per-
formed as a backward search by examining the refer-
ences of the initially found publications for other rel-
evant literature. To find papers that already cited the
relevant publications, the forward search by Google
Scholar and Scopus was used. Various keywords were
derived from the research questions and formulated as
a boolean expression to search the databases. Fol-
lowing the initial review of the initial publications,
an expansion of the search term was conducted to
include additional relevant keywords. In order to
cover a period of 20 years, publications from 2003
onward were considered further. Older literature was
3
https://scholar.google.com/
4
https://www.scopus.com/
Knowledge Management in Civil Protection at the Example of Fire Brigades
259

excluded since the focus is on KM and its digital sup-
porting tools. A wider scope does not make sense
given the exponential evolution of technology. The
second search iteration, which included both back-
ward and forward searches, yielded 390 publications
that met the search criteria. The search was termi-
nated in April 2023 after the search pattern was fully
exhausted. Repeating the search immediately before
submission yielded two further results. Finally there
were 392 publications given to the SLR process.
3.4 Screen for Inclusion
Subsequently, a two-step process was carried out to
review the papers for inclusion in this review. The first
step was to examine the title to determine whether the
publication fits into the desired set. If the title was
not sufficiently informative, the abstract of the work
was taken into account. Each of the two researchers
independently rated all of the 392 publications with
the labels “include”, “discuss” and “discard”. After-
wards, both ratings were merged: papers marked by
one or both with “include” were included (62), the
“discuss” papers (if one or both marked a paper as
“discuss”) were examined in a joint meeting to deter-
mine whether the paper was relevant or not (76), and
all papers marked by both researchers with “discard”
were discarded from the literature body (254). A sub-
sequent backward and forward search yielded further
publications (9), which were assessed for inclusion
in the literature inventory and then added. Combined
with the outcome of the ”discuss”-marked papers, this
resulted in a total of 138 publications, which were
used as the basis for the in-depth analysis.
3.5 Assess Quality
The second step of the quality assessment process is
the review of the entire publication. There was no
access to the full text of 11 publications through the
provided library and other sources. In addition, 47
papers were excluded as not covering both key topics,
two papers were found to be duplicate and another 36
papers were considered inappropriate for the research
questions and were hence discarded. A total of 42
papers were considered for further analysis.
3.6 Extracting Data
By applying the inductive coding concept, publica-
tions were evaluated for inclusion in this paper. The
publications were assigned to different categories.
The results’ overview of the literature review can
be found in the Open Research Knowledge Graph
(Schultz et al., 2024a), where the categories for each
publication are aligned to the ones of the literature re-
view.
3.7 Analyze and Synthesize Data
Four overviews and reviews throughout the past 20
years were identified that are relevant for the research
goal. Starting with the analysis by (Dorasamy et al.,
2013), they already pointed out the need for unified
terminologies. The stated need for a better under-
standing of determinants for KMS success factors is
already partially addressed by other publications (e.g.,
(Seneviratne et al., 2010)). The research gap of what
is missing in KM research towards a theoretical back-
ground is addressed by (Oktari et al., 2020). The
investigation by (Anand et al., 2022) on KM in cri-
sis gives a suitable overview of the literature accord-
ing to the disaster management circle. The most re-
cent review paper by (Fauzi et al., 2024) takes a bib-
liographic perspective and categorizes the literature
body into different clusters, which should point out
current and upcoming trends. No distinction is made
between professional and voluntary personnel. Al-
though the search queries are rather broad, the num-
ber of publications linking KM and CP is rather small
and still partially related to management literature and
strategies.
The response phase is covered by most publica-
tions that are related to the disaster management cir-
cle and there are only a few publications related to
the other phases. The publication by (McNaughton
and Rao, 2018) focuses on the application in the
Caribbean region. Their approach is to implement
a knowledge broker to share disaster information be-
tween Caribbean states. Mayor challenges are stan-
dardization and a coordinated production of knowl-
edge and knowing what knowledge is where. The
work is continued in (Rao and McNaughton, 2019).
The proposed lessons-learned approach by (Rostis,
2007) gives input on how to integrate this source of
knowledge into a KMS (Rostis, 2007). (Otim, 2006)
chose the approach of case-based KM which relies
on already captured knowledge from previous inci-
dents, similar to Rostis approach. As a sole source of
knowledge, case-based systems always face the prob-
lem of requiring a previous case that is comparable
and stored in the system. Yet, it can provide guidance
if cases occur more often, but then emergency person-
nel might already know the solution. The two follow-
ing publications refer to mostly large-scale disasters
like floods (Lee et al., 2011) or earthquakes (Cinque
et al., 2015). They investigate the exchange of in-
formation during an event between different disaster
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260

management agencies and point out the need for in-
formation systems focusing on the public sector (Lee
et al., 2011). Similarly, (Saoutal et al., 2015) cover the
inter-organizational exchange of knowledge as well,
augmented by elaboration on awareness issues and
a proposed system architecture. The publication by
(Seneviratne et al., 2010) covers disaster knowledge
success factors which deal with a lessons-learned ap-
proach again, here in the recovery phase. The identi-
fication of technological, social, legal, environmental,
economic, functional, institutional and political fac-
tors provide a good basis for developing and main-
taining knowledge and information management sys-
tems.
The publications on models and meta-models seek
to elaborate models that are able to represent the
characteristics of this domain and provide means to
describe activities or entities. This includes formal
language models that are used as a foundation for
human- and machine-readable descriptions. (Oth-
man and Beydoun, 2010) apply a case-based reason-
ing approach, which accepts input queries and out-
puts a model fragment that should be suitable for the
decision makers independently of the type of disas-
ter. The results of the publication are four Unified
Modeling Language (UML)-diagrams for each of the
four disaster management circle phases. The UML-
diagrams are validated with existing meta-models and
augmented with missing items. This work is prepara-
tory and continued in (Othman and Beydoun, 2016).
(Franke et al., 2010) create a new description lan-
guage, based on interviews and the Business Process
Model and Notation (BPMN) to enable the depic-
tion of temporal dependencies. It is supposed to be
used within and between organizations and activities
can be combined flexibly. A simplified process mod-
eling language for disaster management is proposed
by (Ziebermayr et al., 2011). It should help shar-
ing the knowledge of experienced people. Unfortu-
nately, no implementation is described in the publi-
cation. (Benaben et al., 2016) examine the informa-
tion extraction from data flows for emergency man-
agement and the credibility of data sources. They pro-
pose a meta-model that helps transforming incoming
data into information and knowledge subsequently.
The core meta-model is surrounded by four packages
for the domains context, partners, objectives and be-
havior (Benaben et al., 2016).
Only one relevant paper by (Oliveira et al., 2022)
was found that deals with the sharing of tacit knowl-
edge (the knowledge that is not explicitly written
down but rather in the practitioners’ heads (as experi-
ences)). There are other publications in the business-
related body of literature that deal with tacit knowl-
edge, but in the field of emergency management, this
is the only one that is relevant to the research ques-
tions. (Oliveira et al., 2022) elaborated on indica-
tors for tacit knowledge sharing and measures to be
implemented. Six excerpted indicators are: individ-
ual time management: whether practitioners have the
time for sharing their knowledge; mutual confidence:
firefighters need to trust each other; relationship net-
work: who has which knowledge and is willing to
share it with others; hierarchy: people with hierar-
chically higher positions need to allow access to their
knowledge; knowledge storage: differentiation be-
tween storing explicit knowledge (in databases) and
implicit knowledge in peoples’ heads; power: having
knowledge is perceived as a kind of dominance over
others who lack knowledge.
Descriptions of practical implementations of
KMS within the CP domain are rare. Only three sci-
entific publications were found that cover KM solu-
tions. (Pickles, 2004) describes a solution for the
Australian New South Wales fire brigade to share in-
formation within and with other organizations. Un-
fortunately, no further publications could be retrieved
for this solution. (Othman and Beydoun, 2016) is
the continuation of (Othman and Beydoun, 2010) and
describes a knowledge-based approach to structuring,
storing and reusing disaster management knowledge.
They describe a system architecture for a knowledge
sharing system. Lastly, (Timm et al., 2013) cover
a state-wide knowledge and collaboration platform
which should be implemented by using open-source
solutions to replace a commercial and costly solution.
Except for the last one, the first two deal with KMS
during or mainly related to an incident. Yet, the ap-
plication and usage of KM systems in non-incident
phases can provide users with an increased level of
confidence.
4 DISCUSSION
The SLR revealed papers that are related to KM in the
disaster management field. The scarce amount of re-
cent publication shows that there is a need to research
KM within disaster management to foster the usage
of digital KM systems in that field. Studies on shar-
ing knowledge in non-profit organizations are rare but
do exist, although limited only to tacit knowledge
(Oliveira and Pinheiro, 2021) or are focused on emer-
gency response information system (Weidinger et al.,
2021), (Alexander, 2010). One interesting approach
is the development of a knowledge broker for Small
Islands Developing States (SIDS) by McNaughton
and Rao in (McNaughton and Rao, 2018) and (Rao
Knowledge Management in Civil Protection at the Example of Fire Brigades
261

and McNaughton, 2019). It deals with important
aspects like avoiding knowledge silos, distributing
information about who has which information and
aligning organizations’ vocabularies to gain a com-
mon understanding. Their use-case is on SIDS, but
their assumptions are transferable to the fire brigades
as well.
Concerning RQ1, this SLR revealed a decent
amount of scientific literature dealing with KM in
CP. The focus, although, is more on generic disas-
ter management than especially on fire brigades (e.g.
(Saoutal et al., 2015), (Oktari et al., 2020)). The re-
sponse phase is covered by the majority of publica-
tions; the other phases are only covered by a few. The
usage of a KM system in non-incident phases can help
the users get familiar with the system; however, only a
few publications could be found. None of them were
suitable for the research goal (e.g., too specific on a
location or circumstance). The conclusion that using
a KMS in non-incident phases will improve user capa-
bilities during a stressful and timely limited incident
scenario cannot be drawn from the identified scarce
literature. Also, KMS are mostly used in large-scale
disasters with multiple agencies involved and many
people affected. It is not described that practitioners
use these systems already in small-to-medium inci-
dents with manageable challenges.
The implementation in existing organizations and
procedures as well as the training with KMS was ad-
dressed in RQ2. Unfortunately, the identified publi-
cations only refer to theoretical concepts (e.g. (Otim,
2006), (Rostis, 2007), (Franke et al., 2010)). Liter-
ature, describing a practical implementation with a
validation, is scarce. One solution is presented by
Cinque et al. in (Cinque et al., 2015). Their support-
ing platform aims at connecting various stakeholder
organizations by introducing a common ontology and
vocabulary. The actual implementation in existing
procedures or the training is not part of their publica-
tion. Differences between voluntary and professional
fire fighters are only addressed in a few publications
that focus on the sharing of knowledge in volunteer or
non-profit organizations (e.g. (Oliveira et al., 2022),
or (Oliveira et al., 2022)). The integration of KM
into daily routines to familiarize with these systems
is not described by any of the identified publications.
Partially, results from business sciences might be ap-
plicable for fire departments as well, up to the point
where the organization switches from non-incident to
an incident. There is an immense change of require-
ments and conditions taking place, which also affect
the usage of a KMS (weather conditions, stress, lim-
ited time) (Weidinger et al., 2021), (Elmasllari, 2018).
Concerning RQ3, there are few publications de-
scribing concrete KM solutions and their applications,
but these systems are either private and not accessible
by the authors or in an old state and describe software
that is or was used years ago. As information tech-
nologies are evolving quickly, a modern and recent
description is lacking that describes the current usage
of KM solutions in the field.
5 CONCLUSION
This literature review was carried out in order to an-
alyze the intersection of KM and CP. KM in fire
brigades is considered particularly relevant, as these
organizations have to deal with different types of in-
cident scenarios. Following a SLR based on (Xiao
and Watson, 2017), the current state of the literature
body on KM in CP was elaborated. It identified that
the predominant focus is on KM during an incident to
help practitioners in the response phase. There is not
much literature covering non-incident phases. How-
ever, it can be argued that systems for everyday opera-
tions would be useful. This could help users to get ac-
quainted with the system and eventually increase their
confidence during stressful and time-sensitive inci-
dents. It is not only necessary to have a KMS, but also
the knowledge culture (cf. (International Organiza-
tion for Standardization, 2018)) has to be embodied in
an organization. As stated by Rao and McNaughton,
the practitioners need to be aware of which informa-
tion and knowledge exists and where it is stored. The
maintenance of knowledge silos hampers the devel-
opment of a shared understanding of knowledge that
could be helpful for coping with incidents and disas-
ters (Rao and McNaughton, 2019). The findings will
be used in further research dealing with the develop-
ment of KMS for fire brigades.
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