Interoperability,
Infrastructure,
and Decision-Making By Freeland abbot
Even before September 11th, and certainly before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, emergency responders were grappling with interoperability problems that prevented their effective cooperation. The September 11th Commission noted pointedly that New York City firefighters and police responders with incompatible radios were unable to share potentially life-saving information. Considering state, federal, military, and non-government responders makes the challenge even more daunting.
This situation resulted in Department of Human Services funding to resolve those difficulties for “next time”. Sadly, Katrina demonstrated that we still have far to go.
“Interoperability” is a multi-leveled concept. Software applications are considered interoperable if they share a common data format such that information created and stored by users of one application can be accessed and manipulated by users of another. The rise of the Web, and of Web-based applications and standards, represents a great step forward in this regard. However, application interoperability requires a means of exchanging the common data, which is what the fire and police departments lacked. Data and application interoperability together are of little use without organizational interoperability. Agencies’ policies and procedures must allow for the contributions and actions of other organizations, and their personnel must be willing and able to adapt to the specific resources and needs of the moment: If buses are needed and school systems have buses and drivers available, then police and medical services must be able to interoperate with school dispatchers.
Data and application interoperability are both issues of infrastructure: the systems and structures that are in place before an event. These are largely technological aspects: They are comparatively easily resolved, but require physical resources to function. After September 11th, the infrastructure of New York would have been largely intact had it been interoperable. For Katrina, wind and floods largely eliminated telephone, antenna, and electricity facilities, as well as all systems depending on them. Contingency planning for large-scale disasters must consider the risks and consequences of infrastructure damage.
