"Med krisekommunikasjonsplanen i lomma" - mobilapplikasjoner til krisehåndtering i totalforsvaret

The FFI project ”Smart collaboration in the new information landscape” explores civil-military collaboration and more effective military cooperation by using civil technology like smart phones, cloud services and mobile phone applications. Smart phone technology has proven to be an effective tool in crisis management in international catastrophes. The report describes the opportunities for using smart phones, mobile applications and eventually cloud services in crisis management in Norway. The report focuses in particular on the technological opportunities in crisis communication. The report addresses the following research question: What are the opportunities to use smart phones and apps as tools for crisis management and civil-military collaboration? Catastrophes are stressful situations where the decision makers, first responders, military staff and civil stakeholders are challenged by lack of timely and relevant information, time pressure and a high degree of uncertainty. The uncertainty is related to the huge amount of available information. The widespread dissemination of smart phones among the population provides, however, unused opportunities for stakeholders and crisis responders to share real time information across the civil and military sector. Mobile technology and mobile apps provide opportunities to produce a shared situational awareness and improve the decision making. Smart phones and cloud services offer opportunities for scalability of services and availability everywhere as long as you have an internet connection. The use of such technology raises at the same time some basic security questions. Another challenge is related to the validity and quality of data found on the Internet. Crisis communication is an area where there are already several tools for developing mobile apps. In addition, there are free and commercial apps available. Even though these apps offer many services, they are still not designed to serve the specific need of the Norwegian civil emergency preparedness or the needs of the defense sector. Current available apps can however inspire future developments within mobile technology in order to provide increased flexibility and user-centric solutions. The report concludes that there are considerable opportunities for leveraging mobile technology to achieve more flexible solutions and to make information available down to the individual level in civil-military crisis management. This will also strengthen the stated aim that those closest to the incident should be able to handle it locally (“nærhetsprinsippet” in Norwegian), provided that the underlying infrastructure ensures that the information reaches the user. Further research work will be directed towards the development of one or more demonstrators that can contribute to increased knowledge in this field, including the infrastructures and backend systems. The work should not be limited to information sharing, situational awareness and civil and military collaboration, but should also cover topics like strategic communication and information to the public.