Crossing Borders, Organizations, Levels and Technologies: IS Collaboration in Humanitarian Relief

Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly facing complex challenges due to the high frequency of natural disasters and the growing number of actors in the humanitarian relief sector. One of these complex challenges is the management of information. In an attempt to mitigate these challenges, NGOs are increasingly collaborating through inter-organizational structures such as collaboration bodies to find mechanisms to coordinate information technologies. These collaboration bodies facilitate four kinds of "cross" collaboration; 1) cross organization, 2) cross border, 3) cross levels, and 4) cross technology. Within each collaboration body the role and function of a project also takes on special significance as much of the cross collaboration activities are channeled through projects that cross all four types of collaboration. In this paper we examine four case studies set in two collaboration bodies focused on IT in the humanitarian sector.