Identifying Collaboration Challenges in Crisis Management

Because of the urgency to respond quickly to large-scale aviation catastrophes such as the 9/11 attacks, National Airspace Security collaboration requires tightly-orchestrated activities across a number of organizations in multiple locations. Today this coordination is by voice only, using the conference call known as the Federal Aviation Agency’s Domestic Events Network. Besides a lack of digital data sharing among all participants, also missing are common tools and joint training in techniques, procedures, and practices for inter-organizational decision-making, collaboration, and response coordination. We have been analyzing collaboration among National Airspace Security partners via an extensive series of interviews and observation sessions with the goal of providing recommendations for technologies, processes, and training that can improve crisis management. This paper describes the process we used to gather data, provides our interview questions as a resource for others, summarizes the problems that we have found, and presents an example of the potential solutions that we plan to investigate further. We believe that our process can be applied to investigations of large-scale collaboration in other time-sensitive, cross-organizational situations such as humanitarian response to natural disasters. Further, our results can inform others who are responsible for crisis management regarding the collaboration challenges that their operations may encounter.