Design principles for critical incident response systems

The national incident management system (NIMS) was developed so that responders from different jurisdictions and disciplines could work together to respond to natural and manmade disasters and emergencies, including acts of terrorism. The NIMS document provides a set of guidelines about practices but it does not make explicit the design requirements for information systems to support the management of critical incidents. Though there are academic and practitioner papers in the general area of emergency management, there is a lacuna of literature discussing how to design information systems to support critical incident response. In this paper we develop a set of design principles that are grounded in emergency management concepts and also in the insights from the real response managers in the Western New York area. The set of design principles provide a foundation for the development of critical incident response systems.