Cultural Analysis and Formal Standardised Language — a Mass Casualty Incident Perspective

Handling highly dynamic scenarios as they arise in mass casualty incident (MCI) situations requires lots of information about the situation and an extremely flexible IT infrastructure that can assist in managing the incident. Normally, rescue workers from different organisational cultures do not communicate across their organisational boundaries, but in an MCI they have to efficiently collaborate in order to successfully manage the incident. In this paper we argue that qualitative cultural analysis can provide important insights into the design of technological systems that are to be deployed in inter-organisational settings like an MCI. We will show how the engineering of complex knowledge based systems for such scenarios can profit from the results of such an analysis.