Making Decisions During Disasters: Information Management Can Help

While we generally focus on information management impacting businesses and their ability to turn data into actionable insights, there are many industries that use IM. Social Media 4 Good relays information about new technologies that can benefit non-profits as indicated in their article, "How to Improve Information Management and Decision Making in Disasters."

The author acknowledges that her article is not the first to take on this brainstorming, but perhaps organizations did not have the capapbilities to address IM challenges back in 2002 when data still mainly flowed from organizations outwards.

The article offers how information collection and analysis should be tranformed in this industry:

IM systems should treat actionable information differently from information for situational awareness. This means that different kinds of information should also be routed to different recipients.

IM systems always have to adapt to the current disaster. However, the software that IM relies on is frequently built according to requirements that have been specified many years ago. Humanitarian response organizations should instead pursue an agile, open source approach where developers add modules to a common, standardized core.

If ROI has ever been meaningful, it may be most meaningful for NGOs and non-profit organizations that are operating on low budgets. We are optimistic that open source information management solutions will lead the way in revolutionizing 

Megan Feil, June 26, 2012