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Context and Background 

Introduction

Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) initiated the Information Technology and Crisis Management (ITCM) project in 2001 to address the identified need to improve the information sharing practises and communications systems of humanitarian response and crisis management actors. The ITCM project recognizes security management as the core issue around which to improve organizational interconnectivity and information sharing.

The ITCM project aims to achieve its overarching aim of enhancing the recovery of populations affected by crisis, through improving the security of those living and working in the area. The ITCM-project is a catalytic initiative: by using shared security management solutions, organisations responding to crisis can shift life-critical resources from ad hoc self-protection exercises to their core activities of supporting community crisis recovery.

Background

Over the past 15 years, the scale of contemporary international crisis management has increased dramatically. During the Cold War, the international community typically responded to comparatively straightforward natural disasters. Today, it routinely engages inpolitically-sensitive peacekeeping and peace enforcement actions and large-scale, extremely complex, often interminable, civilian capacity-building operations. As a consequence, today’s crisis management community consists of many actors: local and national governmental, international governmental, intergovernmental, and both international and local non-governmental organisations, representing disparate sectors with divergent missions and agendas, required to carry out their charge over an indefinite period of time in the same arena. In these circumstances, effective response to crises requires intensified inter-intra-agency and cross-border co-operation as well as interoperability of management as well as ICT systems among the responding organisations.

The Brahimi Report to the UN Secretary General in 2000 recognized a core challenge for UN crisis response agencies. The report called on agencies engaged in peace operations to adapt to information age technologies and practices. Its message was that all crisis response operations should secure and coordinate appropriate information and interactive communication technologies to fulfil their missions. According to the report, information technology and interoperability, as well as knowledge management, are necessary to the success of future peace operations.

Characterised by high staff turnover and with personnel drawn from many cultures with disparate operating styles, international humanitarian agencies suffer from a lack of organized institutional knowledge. ICTs offer the ability to capture and manage knowledge gained through experience. Used appropriately, these technologies can bridge staffing gaps, preserve lessons learned, support continuity of practice, and facilitate the transfer of information and systems to local actors.

Transforming lessons learned and best practices into institutional knowledge and operational protocols represents the international crisis response community’s biggest challenge. Among international agencies, political barriers exist within and between organisations, which prevent effective use of resources. Barriers include competition for funds, an absence of systematic data collection formats, a lack of trust between organisations, incredulity about the benefits of information sharing and, finally, the politics of personality. Add to this complex of issues, the difficulty for commercial providers to work with public sector organisations due to differences in administrative and financial systems.

On the national front, the complexities increase. Areas affected by crisis often lack physical and communication infrastructure and many local actors, including governments and civil society members, suffer lack of skills and access to ICT. Moreover, where new technologies have been introduced, interoperability with partner organisations is not a prerequisite. Planning and developing communications systems typically occurs in isolation within international organizations, with the result that while solutions may meet organisational requirements, they cannot operate with sister crisis response systems, both local and international. Such a patchwork of separate systems neither improves information sharing nor guarantees the safety and security of communities and personnel in high-risk environments.

Security in the broadest sense provides a community focal point engaging all entities (local government, crisis management actors, and the population at large). Regardless of specific mandates, skills and resource levels, or institutional approaches, all entities recognise their fundamental responsibility to safeguard the well-being of populations living in and staff deployed in the crisis area. 

Added value

As noted above, political leaders, international organisations and non-governmental organisations need to muster the political will to work together in developing common information-sharing practices and cooperative management processes in their crisis response efforts. Increased effectiveness requires leadership that commits to an ethic of professionalism and to a practice of sharing information.

Currently, no agreement exists about how inter-agency information sharing should be organised in the crisis arena. Typically, each crisis response organisation operates from a unique or proprietary platform that acquires and keeps its own security-related information. This means that not only does each collect information differently from other organisations but each distributes and thinks about it differently.

Through appropriate use of ICTs, ITCM proposes to introduce new coordination mechanisms, concepts, and information about how to develop operational efficiency and safety of personnel and the local population. In addition, the project identifies and makes available information on new ICT initiatives and best practices about information-sharing models among the community of crisis responders.

Multi-sector partnerships are pivotal to designing and developing solutions that respond to user needs in the crisis area. ITCM’s value to the effort is its ability to engage actors from crisis management community and local actors with private sector experts in a combined effort to improve connectivity and co-operation in crisis environments.