Design Principles for Crisis Information Management Systems

Since Hurricane Katrina, a lot of research has gone into improving disaster management through the use of crisis information management systems (CIMS). There has been much interest in how to design dynamic CIMS, particularly with respect to web-based emergency management systems. In the authors' research, they set out to design and develop a distributed web-based training and research tool for emergency managers and scholars. In order to develop their training system, they needed to simulate the CIMS that emergency managers use during a crisis and with which they could run training and research simulations. This raised the question: What exactly is a CIMS, and how does one design one? In order to answer this question, the authors engaged in nine months of field research at the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center in Miami-Dade County, FL. Through their field research and the emergency management experience of one of the authors, they identified several additional design principles for CIMS in today's technological and communication landscape. This paper outlines the resulting recommendations.