An Empirical Examination of IT-Enabled Emergency Response: The Cases of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an empirical study that analyzes emergency incident response. The paper studies how information systems (IS) complement other organizational assets to help emergency responders achieve satisfactory response performance. We test the research model using empirical data collected from responses to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. The results show that IS-enabled asset allocation support directly improves emergency response performance and also positively interacts with non-IS response assets in achieving response success. The results also confirm the value of dispatch systems, interagency communications, and knowledge repositories in developing asset allocation support for an emergency response organization.