Supporting Crisis Management Processes by Wirelessly Interconnected Tablet-PCs

When organizations face unforeseen emergency situations its members often resort to unstructured crisis management activities in order to overcome the problems. Researchers have noted that a common activity in these scenarios is the construction of a shared awareness of the situation in order to collaboratively identify the actions required to be carried on and the most suitable people to do them. In this paper we present a collaborative application based on Tablet-PCs to assist these unstructured activities aiming to improve their consistency and effectiveness. Inspired on the Reasons Swiss-Cheese model for accidents, the proposed approach relies on the development of a shared situation awareness, constructed from a set of collaboratively constructed situation matrixes which expose involved users contributions to the overall solution strategy. Three application scenarios are used as example.