Abstract

Existing information systems often lack support to crisis and emergency situations. In such scenarios, the involved actors often engage in ad hoc collaborations necessary to understand and respond to the emerging events. We propose a collaboration model and a prototype aiming to improve the consistency and effectiveness of emergent work activities. Our approach defends the requirement to construct shared situation awareness (SA). To support SA, we developed a collaborative artifact named situation matrixes (SM), which relates different situation dimensions (SD) of the crisis/emergency scenario. A method was also developed to construct and evaluate concrete SM and SD. This method was applied in two organizations' IT service desk teams, which often have to deal with emergency situations. The target organizations found our approach very relevant in organizing their response to emergencies. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.