Network Information Management for Collaboration in Disaster Management: Concepts and Case Study

Interorganizational information exchange has become crucial to increase resilience and agility in disaster management. New collaborations between organizations to exchange information through innovative technologies create challenges for information management. It implies different stakeholders, diversified policies, multiple interpretations of innovative technologies, restricted knowledge of each other's organizations and shared governance of processes of innovation, cooperation, design and decision making. We offer an approach for Network Information Management that allows for and takes advantage of these differences between stakeholders and their organizations. An approach in which innovation, cooperation, design and decision-making is shared among stakeholders. The approach is based on three basic components: process management, scenario based development and organizing vision. These components reinforce each other resulting in convergence of stakeholder's positions throughout the process. The approach has been applied and tested in an innovation project for disaster management in the Netherlands, which serves as a case study in this paper.