A Commercial Cloud-Based Crisis Information Management System: How Fit and Robust Is It in Response to a Catastrophe?

Abstract

Professional disaster response management is supported by the so-called Crisis Information Management Systems (CIMS), which help capture, update, organize, share, and keep incident-relevant information, contribute to situational awareness, maintain a common operating picture, initiate and manage resource requests, assign tasks, and track progress among a host of other functionality needed in the coordination and direction of response units. One of the most widely proliferated CIMS is a commercial system known under its product name of WebEOC, which as the name indicates is a Web-based system. While WebEOC provides a large range of functionality, it has not been researched how robustly and appropriately this system fares when incidents of large scope, scale, and duration require the collaboration and coordination of multiple response agencies across both jurisdictional boundaries and different governmental levels. This study establishes technical and nontechnical challenges that WebEOC-supported responders face when responding to larger-magnitude incidents. The study confirms in some detail a previous congressional investigation on the subject. WebEOC appears to not scale effectively when used in multi-jurisdictional and multilevel settings, which introduces additional vulnerabilities to the response itself.