Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine emergency employees’ perception of the possibilities and challenges of the implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in their daily processes. Therefore, interviews with eight emergency services employees from differing organizational and positional backgrounds were conducted over the course of two separate research projects. These semi-structured personal and group interviews were subsequently transcribed, and analysed using Grounded Theory. The authors come to the conclusion, that changing perspectives on technology in emergency processes could help enable better cooperation between emergency employees and technology. The raising of employee awareness, and the provision of sufficient training, is vital to both further the understanding of technology as non-human actor and to focus on their interconnectedness. This enhanced interaction between human emergency employees and non-human technological systems could lead to the improved exploitation of socio-technical opportunities to increase the overall security of our society. This research paper seeks to draw out lessons for ICT-implementation within emergency services by examining the opinions and perspectives of employees from different emergency organizations. In so far, the findings and recommendations of the article will support efforts made by emergency organizations to integrate Information and Communication Technologies into their existing processes.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the participants who gave them their time and shared their thoughts. All interviews were conducted in German; the authors translated quotes. The results were developed as part of the projects “Efficient prioritization of emergency vehicles in automated road traffic” and “CBRN City Sensor Network”. Both projects are funded by the Austrian security research program KIRAS supported by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Regions and Tourism (BMLRT).
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Pospisil, B., Seböck, W. (2021). Opportunities and Challenges of ICT in Emergency Processes. In: Murayama, Y., Velev, D., Zlateva, P. (eds) Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction. ITDRR 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 622. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81469-4_16
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