Citation

von Lubitz DKJE, Beakley JE, Patricelli F. Disasters 2008; 32(4): 561-585.

Affiliation

HG and GA Dow College of Health Sciences, Central Michigan University, and MedSMART, Inc., United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-7717.2008.01055.x

PMID

18479475

Abstract

The ever-increasing complexity of disasters demands utilisation of knowledge that exists outside domains traditionally drawn upon in disaster management. To be operationally useful, such knowledge must be extracted, combined with information generated by the disaster itself, and transformed into actionable knowledge. The process, though, is hampered by existing, business-oriented approaches to knowledge management, by technical issues related to access to relevant, multi-domain information/knowledge, and by executive decision-making processes based predominantly on historical knowledge. Consequently, as shown by many recent incidents, the management of large-scale (mega) disasters is often inefficient and exceedingly costly. This paper demonstrates that the integration of modified information and knowledge management into the concepts of network-centric operations and network-enabled capabilities, and the employment of Boyd's OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) Loop-based decision-making in unpredictable and dynamically changing environments, may address some of these problems.

Language: en