Critical Learning from Fires: An Investigation of Complexity in IS-enabled Emergency Management
Andrew C. Edwards, Stephen Smith, Peter Anthony Busch, Donald W. Winchester, Felix Ter Chian Tan, Vincent Pang · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2020
Emergency services and academics alike recognize that in any types of fire; citizens and government must actively interact to prevent the loss of property, lives, economic and environmental impacts. Most fire research focuses on bushfires or wildfires. In this paper we concentrate particularly on house fires. We apply complexity theory as our lens to investigate the role of Information Systems (IS) in emergencies. Complexity theory improves our learning on the role of IS in emergencies by linking it to Situational Awareness. A significant issue is that the current response paradigm is reactionary i.e. prepare but wait for the emergency call, then respond. We investigate how innovations in digital infrastructures intertwining with elements of complexity found in emergency services, could bring about a shift from a response to a proactive paradigm extending the Comprehensive Emergency Management Framework to include Projection.