Information Sharing: A Persistent Challenge

Crises like the recent earthquake in Haiti focus public and official attention toward the mechanisms of response efforts -- and toward information management in particular.  A major challenge in understanding the efficacy of crisis communications remains to ask the right questions about the nature of decentralized organizations, and even of information itself.  Assumptions about how to communicate most effectively must be measured against the real constraints and possibilities of institutions responding to a crisis.

The language of better communication has come to take on an almost dogmatic character.  Particularly within official circles the terms: coordinate, cooperate, collaborate, partnership, interagency, need to share, etc. are regularly invoked.  Where the limitations of rigid hierarchies have been exposed, the calls to engage horizontally across lines of authority have been raised.  Resources and expertise need not be consolidated in one place (a single agency or funding stream) if they can at least be made accessible to the range of participants in a common endeavor, yet this does not take into account a variety of sources of institutional inertia that make information sharing a much more challenging exercise in practice than theory.  Why is it that, despite considerable attention and effort, effective information management and information sharing remains elusive?

Exchanges with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. State Department, and U.S. AID personnel lead me to conclude that comprehensive information management is hindered by obstacles within six general themes.  Let’s consider these themes and their implications for organizational postures toward disaster response.

Ad hoc

The most refined capacities to plan for possible emergencies (natural disasters, humanitarian crises, etc.) will always be challenged by the difficulty of predicting such occurrences in detail.  In responding to a crisis, the experience and resourcefulness of a vast range of actors comes into play -- many of whom will have worked together in the past, and many of whom may be skeptical of each other's motives.  There is no procedure or tool for improving relationships and building trust, yet a willingness to support the work of others in the field can accomplish a great deal.  Because of the immediacy of need in the aftermath of a particular event, we can expect a certain measure of cooperation, but it is a different matter entirely for such working relationships to translate into sustained interactions with a marked effect on organizational doctrines and processes. 

Timelines

Either by mandate or because of unique cultures, organizations often operate under different time frames.  This has the effect of contextualizing specific activities in different ways for different groups.  Though these generalizations may be too stark, development agencies will pursue strategies focused on improving living conditions of effected populations in the long term, aid workers face the challenge of delivering immediate relief to stricken peoples, and deployed security forces have little time to theorize about long-term stability when violence and strife must be addressed instantly.  Without denigrating the expertise of any of the above, it should be no surprise that their various requirements can and do come into conflict. 

Urgency

Awareness that something is amiss (whether in process, attitudes, or technological capabilities) does not imply that improvements are imminent, or perhaps more importantly, that a consensus is possible across agencies on what would define progress.  Similarly, where some will find redundancy in need of streamlining, others will see organizational autonomy worth protecting.  In any case, established procedures, long-standing working relationships, and volumes of approved "best practices" are the means by which large enterprises maintain the integrity to function in the first place.  Proposing changes to any of this requires at least a small measure, and more likely quite a lot, of experimentation.  If, in turn, this experimentation is meant to have a practical effect on front-line, rubber-meets-the-road, tip-of-the-spear activities, it must incorporate the operational, planning, and policy shops of the organizations in question -- offices that may be most averse to experimentation because of its real world consequences.  If regular collaborative behaviors and information sharing are not being nurtured, encouraged, or even demanded by leadership, then any kind of drastic overhaul is still more illusive. 

Context

Data and information are neither conceptually nor practically interchangeable, and yet a desire persists to aggregate and categorize raw data, with the assumption that this will lead to better understanding.  While such a tendency may result from the very nature of bureaucracy, it fails to appreciate the analytical, sense-making, capabilities resident across distributed enterprises, as well as the reasons for choosing which data to collect.  Attempting to duplicate external analytical capabilities in house becomes not just a matter of creating redundancy (or efficiency, depending on the perspective), but also applying an entirely different context to data, which will yield different information.  While we can expect there to be internal consequences for either misrepresenting or poorly contextualizing data, the challenge of maintaining shared knowledge across different parts of the enterprise is not one that will solve itself, either via technology or process, if there are insufficient means to adjudicate discrepancies.  Automated processes of aggregating, labeling, and translating databases will not solve these issues. 

Complexity

Response efforts to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are emblematic of the vast range of information resources, augmented in particular by Web-based and Web-native capabilities that have begun to shape the communications technology environment.  The wikis maintained by the ICT for Peace Foundation only begin to hint at the richness of information available online and the complexity of the organizational landscape involved in relief efforts.  References to governmental and international organization resources, particularly those made available by UN OCHA (ReliefWeb and OneResponse, for example), provide an initial means for active responders to achieve some level of shared awareness, while services with the ability to accept contributions from the public at large, like Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, and CrisisCommons, have been lauded for their ability to produce tangible benefits for the response effort by tapping into popular good will and volunteerism.  Where communications infrastructure remains unreliable and constraints on bandwidth force “lowest common denominator" technologies to be the tools of choice, Web capabilities must find a place alongside telephony, SMS, and, of course, face to face interactions.  (Indeed, Ushahidi's convergence of the Web and SMS is central to its success, both in Haiti and elsewhere.)  It may be as unmanageable to bring such distributed efforts under more unified control as it is unreasonable to dismiss their positive impact.

Classification

A prerogative of formal organizations that regularly stands counter to systematic, rather than situational, cooperative interactions, is the reliance upon proprietary, guarded, and classified information: non-governmental and international organizations may owe the trust of their stakeholders to an ability to keep prying eyes away from vital information; government agencies and militaries are bound by law and institutional culture to seal off their communications from unauthenticated sources; the private sector may associate opening up the resources of the firm with a loss of competitive advantage.  In any case, the need to pursue effective (trustworthy, verifiable, and operationally relevant) information flows among -- rather than within organizational boundaries -- is of paramount importance and remains insufficiently addressed.  A piece released by the Small Wars Journal by a "military humanitarian" highlights some of the absurdities associated with managing communications in this pan-organizational space.  In illustrating the need to "Go unclassified early," the writer explains that only by purchasing "unclassified hard drives for most of the BCT's [Brigade Combat Team] computer systems" was his unit able to "share information with all government agencies and humanitarian organizations working in Port-au-Prince."  Such redundancy might bring to mind the cliché of “reinventing the wheel", so credit to the BCT for recognizing the shortcoming and investing in appropriate alternatives.  That the brigade's "humanitarian assistance common operational picture" shared with UN OCHA  was a "spreadsheet containing over 1500 data points" indicates that even when meticulous attention is given to data collection, there is much that remains to be done in supporting shared information environments in the spaces beyond enterprises.

The responsibility for getting information management right should not fall only on those parts of the organization already taxed by making the best of confusing, dangerous, and rapidly shifting conditions.  There are fundamental questions that must be asked about the assumptions that have gone into building organizational processes and the technology architecture choices that have followed them.  This is not about theorizing the endless possibilities of the open Web, but about recognizing the limitations of idealized institutional designs, then scaffolding processes and capabilities to the realities of complex environments in the context of the digital information economy.

Perspectives in this article are based on conversations and exchanges with personnel from DoD, DoS, and USAID.  In particular, the author would like to credit Larry Wentz, Ivan Labra, Aaron Aschenbrenner, and Jeff Bakken for their insights.  Conclusions, and any shortcomings, are those of the author.