Knowledge-Based Practices in Disaster Management: Development Towards Digital Humanism

Abstract

While new innovative and disruptive technologies are obsoleting existing technologies and necessitating organizational reconfiguration and restructuring in many spheres of life and businesses, the field of disaster management particularly disaster mitigation, is also not isolated from the beneficial changes brought by the transformational capabilities of digitalization. Lack of inter-agency co-operation and co-ordination in disaster risk management, however, can be an obstacle towards this. The mitigation of disasters like flood requires high degree of collaboration among multi-agencies with specialized knowledge in different disciplines as they work towards the same purpose. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of digitized knowledge-based collaboration platform that emphasizes digital humanism which has the capabilities of transforming multi-agencies collaboration effectively, faster and at lower costs towards greater knowledge creation and better mutual understanding. The idea is to put people at the center of the risk reduction efforts. By doing so, the overall digitization picture would accommodate organizational culture and people perspective towards enabling KM mechanisms such as Communities of Practices (CoPs) and other knowledge-based practices that would provide effective interaction and collaboration among experts, practitioners and researchers. This paper contributes a guideline for practitioners not only to succeed in implementing knowledge-based disaster management but to secure the deliverables for public safety and greater community resilience in this digital age. Accordingly, the resultant framework is intended as a useful guideline for drawing attention to the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of Information Systems, Knowledge Management (KM), understanding the interplay between these and the aims of disaster management.