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Practitioners’ Perceptions of Fitness to Task of a Leading Disaster Response Management Tool

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Electronic Government (EGOV 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12850))

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Abstract

Crisis Information Management Systems (CIMS) have been used in Emergency and Disaster Response Management for decades. However, while these systems have emerged and improved over time, they still appear to provide lower efficacy when incidents become more complex, and, in particular, when used in the context of multijurisdictional responses to large and growing incidents and extreme events. Most CIMS like E Team, Veoci, or WebEOC are commercial off-the-shelf systems (COTS), which allow for and also require from emergency response units the customization of the application to their own specific needs. This survey-informed study took a look at practitioners’ experiences with one of the most widely used CIMS, that is, WebEOC. The results were mixed at best and confirm other studies, which pointed at WebEOC’s lack of scalability, interoperability, network security, and ease of use. The study concludes that in the face of ever more frequent incidents of greater magnitude the case for developing and deploying securely interoperable and scalable CIMS is compelling and has to be addressed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Hans J. Scholl

  2. Eric Holdeman and Associates, Puyallup, WA, USA

    Eric E. Holdeman

Authors
  1. Hans J. Scholl
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  2. Eric E. Holdeman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans J. Scholl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Hans Jochen Scholl

  2. Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    J. Ramon Gil-Garcia

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Marijn Janssen

  4. University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Evangelos Kalampokis

  5. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Ida Lindgren

  6. Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar

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Scholl, H.J., Holdeman, E.E. (2021). Practitioners’ Perceptions of Fitness to Task of a Leading Disaster Response Management Tool. In: Scholl, H.J., Gil-Garcia, J.R., Janssen, M., Kalampokis, E., Lindgren, I., Rodríguez Bolívar, M.P. (eds) Electronic Government. EGOV 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12850. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84789-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84789-0_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84788-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84789-0

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