Role management diversity in emergency situations

Abstract

In emergency organizations, shift planning and role management of human resources are basis for managing daily operative work. However, it is challenging due to the emergencies' situation-driven demands and varying human resource needs. Emergencies can be unexpected and dynamic, escalating and prolonging. Available human resources to function in needed roles and related tasks depend on many variables like persons' reachability, location of the incident and personnel, time of the day, type of the incident, and weather conditions. Personnel can operate in various roles as the incident may require. The roles have predefined skill requirements and access rights to information and information systems. The roles can change dynamically several times during a shift or period of the incident. The role can change within organization or across organizational boundaries. Many of the information systems used often lack adequate role-based shift planning, monitoring, and dynamic role changes. Traceability of the time used in each role by a person should be monitored in the system level. Thus, the systems should support monitoring workloads of human resources and ensure, as needed, also justified distribution of work based on different roles. The research of this paper is based on empirical data from various geographically distributed Finnish emergency organizations. The unique Finnish emergency response center (ERC) model has been also significant for the study, because it differs from most other countries in that it consists of authorities' joint emergency response centers. Further, the ERC is a central organization in information exchange and messaging in emergency situations. The joint centers take all emergency calls and alert the necessary authorities directly and simultaneously based on the risk assessment. Multiple authorities' information and information systems are accessed and used, thus relevant laws and policies affect the access rights and information exchange. Further, traceability of the accessed information and the role in which it has been accessed are important. Role management is a key element in system and operative level in emergency organizations' environment where dynamic shift and role changes occur within or between organizations and persons. Firstly, current challenges in emergency organizations' shift planning and role management are detailed and similarities analyzed. Secondly, a generic role-based model for human resource attribute description is proposed. Thirdly, a virtual role concept is outlined and the benefits it can introduce in information system level and what implications it has to system design are discussed.