Disaster Management and Community Warning Systems: Inter-Organisational Collaboration and ICT Innovation

Emergency Services Agencies (ESA) are required to co-operate and collaborate on a regular basis to provide their communities with warning information about disasters and incidents. Community Warning (CW) systems are a vital component of ESA operations as there are many different types of disasters and emergency scenarios of varying complexity and uncertainty, which in turn directly influence the type of CW systems that should be employed by an ESA for any particular incident. This paper outlines research conducted into CW systems in New South Wales (NSW) state government ESA. This research highlights a unified collaborative approach to the assessment, development, deployment and use of CW systems that is based on crisis management theory. This approach could be utilised by governments at federal, state and local levels for cross border and jurisdictional management of ESA informational, ICT and process resources. Such an approach would assist government in better targeting expenditure on CW systems and using ICT in an innovative manner. Results also highlight that when developing and deploying CW systems, there should be careful consideration of a number of background contextual issues such as: stakeholder involvement, incident complexity; utilisation of multi-ICT delivery platforms for economies of scale; integration of multi-ESA operational, community, communication and ICT requirements for shared direction; and development of an ICT architecture for building learning capabilities and skills of stakeholders.