Development of a Mobile Situation Awareness Tool Supporting Disaster Recovery of Business Operations

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) is deemed essential when tackling situations that are characterised by complexity, hard-to-define causal relationships, dynamic changes, and lack of information. This chapter describes the development of a model and tool to support collaborative construction of SA. The proposed model organises awareness information elements according to situation dimensions, dimensional elements, and correlations between dimensional elements. The approach provides a strategic view of the situation and a structure supporting concurrent information updates. The developed tool supports collaborative information management using mobile devices and pen-based interaction. The chapter also reports a case study that has employed the model and tool to support the disaster recovery (DR) of business operations.The adopted research approach is exploratory and theory-driven. The evaluation task adopted the inspection method, employing experts in critical infrastructure maintenance. The obtained results indicate the model and tool are adequate to the types of disruptive events faced by ­critical infrastructure maintenance teams. The obtained results also indicate the proposed model and tool are regarded as mostly important to less ­experienced members; and also fundamental to the development of emergency plans.