How knowledge silos affect emergency management application development

Abstract

The goal of this study is to pinpoint patterns that identify knowledge siloing and missed opportunities to break down such silos. This article discusses how eliminating knowledge silos and increasing collaboration between Emergency Management (EM) and Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITT) professionals can expand situational awareness and improve disaster management. This research uses NVivo software to perform Qualitative Data Analysis on insights provided by subject matter experts (SME), and selected research studies. NVivo is a software program that uses a type of machine learning called natural language processing to perform supervised and unsupervised coding of diverse types of text, audio, and video files. This analysis used the unsupervised method of coding (i.e., the autocoding function), meaning the encoding will arise organically from the themes and insights detected in the data rather than a pre-determined set of codes. SME interviews and published works were fed into the NVivo software in three ways: As whole documents for individual unsupervised coding, as one large file, and as two separate cases (EM versus ITT). Individual unsupervised coding did not reveal any meaningful insights. Merging all datasets into one did reveal some interesting patterns. However, this method did not reveal if there were any missed opportunities for collaboration. Separating the datasets into EM cases and ITT cases did result in significant overlap in certain key areas and is explained in detail in the results section. Analysis reveals several themes common to both the EM and ITT cases, with “Communication” and “Information” being the most common. The discussion posits how Open-Source Solutions can address these themes. This study suggests five improvements: create a user interface using Open-Source Software, design redundant infrastructure so that communications can continue even when traditional infrastructure has been compromised, ensure an equitable distribution of resources between urban and rural communities, train all employees in the roles and responsibilities of their organization at regular intervals, and cross-train EM and ITT professionals will help eliminate gaps in business requirements gathering.