This paper analyses the implications of impediments to effective humanitarian information management and exchange (HIME) flows in the Haiti case, using a framework centring on eight factors that characterise humanitarian emergencies. While HIME offers the promise of timely access to relevant information, how such information is disseminated and utilised by decision-makers through coordination mechanisms is constrained by their ability to recognise and mitigate information flow impediments.
This research focuses on the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake—the emergency response phase of the disaster management cycle. The following sections provide an information-centric overview of the humanitarian system, introducing the authors’ analytical framework of information flow impediments. The analysis is informed by structured desk research of real-time and lessons learnt evaluations of the Haiti response.
The findings indicate that humanitarian decision-making in the Haiti case was most affected by the technical aspects of HIME, including accessibility, formatting inconsistency and storage media misalignment. In contrast, coordination was hampered when information flows were assigned very low priority and because humanitarian actors were unwilling to share humanitarian information with one another. The paper concludes with recommendations to address humanitarian information flow challenges and points out the need for accommodative revisions to the current structures and processes that guide HIME.
Key Findings:
- Coordination among humanitarian agencies can be hindered by the following information flow impediments: inconsistent data formats; storage media misalignment; source identification difficulty, low priority and an unwillingness to share information. Across the Haiti response evaluations, the evidence suggests that coordination appears to have been most affected by a widespread unwillingness to share information—and by low information priority.
- Information flow impediments associated with quality and validity exacerbate ambiguity and equivocality in humanitarian settings and make effective decision-making highly difficult.
Recommendations:
- Do not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Coordination must centre on the knowledge that the setting is complex and produces interaction effects that should be studied carefully. Therefore, needs assessment tools should not be implemented if the process and dissemination is expected to take so long that the information value is diluted and considered unreliable by users. In other words, placing a premium on getting information flows ‘right’ may come at the expense of timeliness of dissemination so decisions can begin to be taken and opportunities for coordination can be explored.
- HIME must be perceived as value added or it will not be utilised. HIME can and should be designed specifically to deal with incompatible and unverifiable data, especially if the use of metadata is streamlined into data collection during humanitarian emergencies. HIME system design also needs to support ‘how people make sense of their environment’ and not simply be devoted to analysing and processing information for information’s sake.
- HIME should accommodate permeability, ownership and integrators. Developing an accommodative approach may well help raise the profile of humanitarian information and create positive buy-in to the process on the part of humanitarian actors, thus enhancing overall system effectiveness. It rests on three interrelated features: permeability, information ownership and information integrators.
