Collaboration Capabilities for Crisis Management

When a crisis such as 9/11 occurs, it requires coordination and collaboration by a number of government agencies as well as the private sector with tightly choreographed activities from many organizations in multiple locations. Although there are accepted collaboration frameworks for operating in a “command and control” mode, where everyone understands who is in charge and what everyone‟s responsibilities are, there is not yet an accepted multiagency “coordinate and collaborate” framework specifically designed for crisis management with less clear lines of authority. This paper presents Part I of a three-part framework that explicitly addresses the multiple characteristics of crisis management collaboration: timesensitivity, synchronicity, non-collocation, and unrelated organizations. This first part of the framework identifies and describes the collaboration capabilities needed to support such crisis management, using United States aviation security as an example domain because it has all of the characteristics described above. Based on a literature search, governance review, and 19 on-site interviews with many aviation security stakeholders, we synthesize the common challenges discovered into 13 essential collaboration capabilities. We generalize these collaboration capabilities beyond the specifics of the aviation security domain so that other crisis management environments that experience cross-organizational, time-sensitive, safety-critical collaboration, such as disaster response or joint military command and control, may leverage concepts from this framework to organize information about their collaboration challenges and solutions. Finally, using an actual aviation security incident, we illustrate the value of systematically identifying and addressing collaboration capability shortfalls.