Improving Humanitarian Aid Information Management Workflow for Disaster Relief Team

Abstract

Information management workflow plays a significant role in the humanitarian aid distribution process. Its aim is to avoid cases where volunteers (NGOs, individual volunteers, and the private sector) have received incorrect disaster information from untrusted sources as well as redundant disaster information from several different authorities. The effects include the inefficient deployment of volunteers within a single disaster area and uneven distribution of humanitarian aid to the disaster victims. This paper aims to solve the problems of poor information management ability and flexibility that exist within the current information management workflow for humanitarian aid distribution. Results presented here are based on literature reviews and interviews with disaster relief teams leading to a proposed comprehensive humanitarian aid distribution information management workflow. This includes important elements, such as the structure of a disaster management organization, the disaster management mechanism, and the role of disaster management stakeholders. The importance of the proposed workflow lies in improving coordination, communication, and collaboration within and between disaster relief teams in managing humanitarian aid distribution during a disaster. Moreover, it could also provide an improved document management platform for the humanitarian aid distribution information available to disaster relief teams.