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DSS News
D. J. Power, Editor
August 31, 2003 -- Vol. 4, No. 18
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check the article by W. K. McQuay "Distributed Collaborative
Environments for Decision Support" at DSSResources.COM
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Featured:
* Ask Dan -- How can computerized decision support help in crisis
situations?
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Releases
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Put your ad here! Help support DSS News
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Ask Dan!
by Dan Power
How can computerized decision support help in crisis situations?
It seems that more crises are occuring in both business and public
domains and the magnitude of them is also sometimes much larger than any
previously encountered. The good news is that managers and politicians
seem to want more computerized decision support to help in both crisis
planning and response. Checklists, vague contingency plans, and
informal, ad hoc coordination are no longer adequate. The bad news is
that we still have many unanswered questions about the "what?" and
"how?" of disaster readiness and crisis and emergency decision support
that need to be investigated and resolved.
This Ask Dan! has been in the works for months. In April 2003, my
research focus turned to advanced decision support for command and
control in military crises. My summer research focused on what was
possible. Recent events have brought new urgency to the topic of crisis
and emergency decision support.
Only a few weeks ago on Thursday, August 14, 2003, the Eastern United
States and Canada experienced the largest electric power outage in
history. Officials are still in an assessment mode about "what happened
and why?" and "what worked well and what could be improved?", but some
control and decision support capabilities worked better than others.
Computerized decision support systems helped manage the crisis, but the
automated systems and human operators were not able to prevent the power
grid system failure. Apparently one or more of the "Control Area
Operators", the computerized centers that dispatch electric power
generators as needed to maintain balance in the electric power grid, was
ineffective (cf., CNN.com). The automated decision and control systems
will likely be updated and new real-time, data-driven decision support
systems will be developed to support human decision makers monitoring
the grid. The grid technology will be updated. The likelihood that such
a crisis will reoccur will decrease. But other potential crisis
situations of various magnitudes still confront private and public
sector planners and decision makers.
Improved infrastructure and systems can reduce the chance of a failure
like the power grid shutdown, but more generalized decision support
capabilities need to be available for emergency response to a wide
variety of possible business and public crises, disasters and
catastrophes. This Ask Dan! focuses broadly on the need for deployed
"decision support environments" for emergency response, crisis decision
making and crisis management. These capabilities are also often called
command centers.
The recent blackout in New York City showcased the operation of a number
of command centers and computerized decision support environments
(CDSE). A command center or decision support center is much more than a
single, integrated computerized decision support system, rather it is a
complex, planned environment for computing, communications and decision
support. A variety of computerized decision support tools and systems
should be accessible and deployed for use in a computerized decision
support environment.
New York City Transit apparently had a new command center with train
location (using Global Positioning System technology) and control
systems that allowed trains to communicate with each other
electronically. This system probably helped in locating stopped trains
for emergency evacuation. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
Air Traffic Command Center was certainly a busy facility. In February
2002, New York City had opened a "new" temporary USD $3.8 million
Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The "new" center replaced the EOC
that former Mayor Giuliani had built at a cost of more than $13 million.
It was located on the 23rd Floor of 7 World Trade Center. That 40 story
building collapsed about 7 hours after the Twin Towers. Giuliani's EOC
was criticized as lavish and ornate and that is possible, but more
importantly it was poorly located. Technology obsolescence is a major
problem with EOCs. On September 11, 2001, E Team (www.eteam.com)
restored New York City command capabilities for emergency operations in
less than 12 hours in temporary facilities. The E Team "NYC 9/11
Emergency Operations" case provides the details and it is sceduled for
publication at DSSResources.COM on 9/11/2003.
The NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has another, smaller scale
command capability and Interagency Command Center, known as the command
bus (cf., www.ci.nyc.ny.us). It is a "specially designed,
self-contained emergency response vehicle that acts as an on-site
command center for incidents requiring multiple agency response. The
command bus is equipped with a state-of-the-art communication system,
on-board electrical generation, and external lighting capabilities, and
it can accommodate several agency heads and/or representatives during an
emergency". How useful a command bus was in such a widespread emergency
as the recent blackout is difficult to assess, but if it was located
strategically (for example at the Ferry docks) it could have made a
significant difference. Deploying command and decision support
capabilities in Crises and Emergency situations will always be
challenging.
Recently, Terence Hinds and I had an ongoing email discussion about
creating a group decision support capability for a crude oil and natural
gas production operation. Business crisis situations don't usually reach
the magitude of the NYC Blackout or the World Trade Center Terrorist
Attacks, but oil and chemical spills can create major human and
environmental disasters (e.g. 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal,
India; the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska).
Terence identified the perceived need as providing more integrated
decision support for Incident Management. He noted an Incident
Management Team makes the decisions in crises. This team comprises an
Incident Commander, Section Chiefs, Marine and Logistics personel, and
various specialists. Some incidents might include: ruptured pipelines
(land and sea), failure of critical equipment, and well or reservoir
failure. The company had many technologies in place, but they were not
integrated. Terence wrote the company had HIVE (with an electronic
whiteboard), a data warehouse, teleconferencing equipment, meeting rooms
with breakout areas, a number of databases in different departments and
SCADA systems that provide online, real time and historical data in
different formats. What was the result? Well ... Terence conducted a
needs assessment and prepared his final year project for his university
degree. Actually figuring out how to provide integrated group support
and collaboration for Incident Management is an ongoing issue and
debate.
Creating integrated decision support environments for command and
control and emergency response is increasingly recognized as an
important topic. What are the problems? The historic problems are only
getting worse. Departments and partner organizations purchase different
software packages that supposedly serve the same function but can not
share data. Communication and information technologies continue to
breakdown in crisis. Stress is high and leads to poor decisions.
Inter-agency rivalry creates problems. There is often a lack of common
terminology among responders. Authority among decision units is
fragmented and decision makers have limited means to coordinate actions
(cf., Smart and Vertinsky, 1977, 1984;Janis, 1989).
Bill McQuay, Technical Advisor, Information Directorate, Air Force
Research Laboratory, contributed a relevant article that is now at
DSSResources.COM. McQuay's paper is titled "Distributed Collaborative
Environments for Decision Support". The goal is "advanced collaboration
with distributed information across multiple domains, simultaneous
interactions, and shared data and applications." Creating such an
integrated decision support environment or capability for crisis
decision making is the challenge. I recommend Bill's article to everyone
interested in computerized decision support in crisis situations.
In New York City, the Management Consulting firm McKinsey & Company
prepared reports on the New York Police and Fire Department responses to
the 9/11 crisis. The NYPD report mentioned improving communications and
information flows. The report on the New York Fire Department response
stressed the need for more inter-agency cooperation, improved
communication and technology capabilities, and the use of the Incident
Command System (ICS). I am only vaguely familiar with ICS and its
procedures, but it is a broad approach for managing crisis situations
and perhaps I can find an article about ICS for DSSResources.COM.
Decision support integration is clearly much more than improved
computerized decision support -- it also involves command roles,
procedures, policies, preparation, practice and cultural changes.
Much more needs to be done. Murray Turoff (NJIT) and Bart Van de Walle
(Tilburg) are proposing a mini-track on "Emergency Response Information
Systems" for AMCIS 2004 in New York City. The minitrack will examine
functionality that Emergency Response Information Systems can and should
provide for those involved in training for a crisis situation, planning
for the response to a crisis situation, responding to a crisis
situation, and evaluating performance during and after a crisis. If you
are doing research in this area and want to report your results, contact
Murray (turoff@njit.edu).
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References
Janis, I. and L. Mann, Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of
Conflict, Choice, and Commitment, New York: The Free Press, 1979.
McKinsey & Company Study on WTC Response - FDNY, URL
http://home.nyc.gov/html/fdny/html/mck_report/index.shtml
McKinsey & Company Study on WTC Response - NYPD, URL
http://home.nyc.gov/html/nypd/pdf/nypdemergency.pdf
Smart, C.F. and I. Vertinsky, "Designs for Crisis Decision Units,"
Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 22, pp. 639-657, December 1977.
Smart, C.F. and Vertinsky, I., "Strategy and environment: A study of
corporate responses to crises," Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 5,
pp. 199-213, 1984.
http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/oem/html/other/sub_photos_pages/command_bus.html
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What's New at DSSResources.COM
08/29/2003 Posted article by McQuay, W.K., "Distributed Collaborative
Environments for Decision Support". Check the articles page.
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DSS News Releases - August 18 to August 29, 2003 -
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News archive.
08/29/2003 CompUSA wins first annual eTail 2003 award for advanced use
of Web analytics.
08/29/2003 Dealix Corporation announces launch of Dealix Business
Intelligence(SM).
08/29/2003 U.S. Air Force successfully launches final Lockheed
Martin-Built DSCS III Spacecraft.
08/28/2003 Army, Boeing-SAIC LSI team complete core Future Combat
Systems team.
08/28/2003 Cutter & Buck expands Business Objects deployment to create
end-to-end business intelligence solution.
08/27/2003 Deutsche Bank taps Fair Isaac technology to create
enterprise-wide credit decisioning and risk monitoring tool.
08/26/2003 According to IDC, worldwide analytic applications software
market to reach over $4.8 billion in 2007.
08/26/2003 Cummins Inc. Engineering Group implements SkillView for their
human capital management initiative.
08/26/2003 3rd Annual Pharma & Biotech Business Intelligence Summit
September 18-19, 2003 in Princeton, N.J. examines CI as key to Strategic
Decision Support.
08/25/2003 Cobb EMC to deploy Intergraph solution for outage and mobile
workforce management.
08/25/2003 Choice Hotels selects Informatica for enterprise-wide
Business Intelligence.
08/25/2003 International Truck and Engine accelerates corporate
performance with Ascential Software enterprise data integration
solution.
08/22/2003 New Sobig worm and Blaster mutants signals arrival of
widespread blended malware attacks.
08/21/2003 Databeacon announces Linux support for its Web reporting and
data analysis application software for the enterprise.
08/21/2003 Crystal Decisions' acknowledges CI0-100 award winner
Huntington National Bank.
08/21/2003 Worm/Sobig.F may establish a Trojan Cyber Army for possible
attack; potentially millions of computers awaiting instructions.
08/20/2003 Experts at Ascential Software forum at TDWI cite new IT
mantra: Business Rules!
08/20/2003 Decision Support Inc. releases new version of application for
lower cost mainframe-server integrated reporting.
08/20/2003 Hyperion highlights newly available products through its OEM
agreement with Brio Software.
08/19/2003 Best Software offers Carpe Diem on BlackBerry(R); legal
professionals can track and record their time From anywhere.
08/19/2003 Core Microsoft Office system products are complete, released
to Manufacturers.
08/19/2003 Hummingbird delivers content cache solution for Hummingbird
Enterprise (TM).
08/19/2003 Innovative Health Solutions and Information Management
Systems: new partnership will provide integrated Decision Support
System.
08/18/2003 Call for Papers: 16th Annual DAMA International Symposium,
May 2-6, 2004 in Los Angeles, California.
08/18/2003 Microsoft Business Solutions announces new functionality for
Microsoft business portal.
08/18/2003 IDC sees bleak future for the unconnected PDA.
08/18/2003 Informatica SuperGlue empowers CIOs with greater visibility
and control of enterprise information.
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2003 by D. J. Power. Please send your questions to
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