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The Role of Military in Disasters<br />Civil-Military Coordination<br />Gísli Ólafsson<br />Disaster Management – Technical Advisor<br />Microsoft Corporation<br />Email: gislio@microsoft.com<br />Blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/disaster/<br />Twitter: @gislio<br />
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“Coordination between civilian and military actors is essential during an emergency response. The increasing number and scale of humanitarian emergencies, in both natural disaster and conflict settings, has led to more situations where military forces and civilian relief agencies are operating in the same environment.”<br />John Holmes, Emergency Relief Coordinator and United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs<br />Coordination – Global Issue<br />
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This is a picture we use both within the UN and also within the Red Cross to explain to people the importance of coordination. I want to stress that this picture shows the simplified version of what it looks like during a large scale disaster where the international community gets involved. Last month I was part of a UN team that was sent to West Sumatra following the devistating earthquake that struck near the city of Padang. During the first week of the response, we had registered 110 organizations involved in the response with over 1500 invididuals taking part. Within the second week this number had gone up to 190 organizations. In Banda Ache following the tsunami there were over 600 organizations involved within the first month.Years ago it was only the government and a few NGOs such as the Red Cross which got involved in disaster response. Today there are more and more NGOs involved, but we also see the private sector getting more involved in this. An example of this from Sumatra is that the local mobile operators and Ericson response were a crucial in quickly repairing the mobile phone infrastructure and thereby enabling better communication within the disaster area. At the same time DHL sent their disaster response team to assist in ensuring that relief items being flown in were quickly and effectively processed through the airport in Padang.But this ever increasing number of actors involved in the response puts a burden on those trying to ensure that the response is effective and that there are not gaps left. To address this the international community looked at ways that could address this burden and result in a more efficient coordination. The international community came up with a model I will describe on the next slide, but I want to point out that this model is not unique to international disaster response, but is actually used by countries to coordinate their national response in an efficent manner.
When asked what was his most important discovery within the area of disaster mangement, Mileti said that 40 years of his work could be sumarized into this one finding.Mileti said we could define three phases of crisis. The first one is the Routine Emergency phase, something our fire figthers and police officers have to deal with every day. Then there are the disasters which overwhelm the daily responders and cause us to change our behaviour. Finally there are the catastrophees which luckliy only happen very seldom throughout our history.But lets look at these different phases and the behaviour of people during these phases. During the normal routine emergency phase, we look towards organizations such as the police to assist us in the problems we have. And when we interact with these organizations we related to the people we deal with through the roles they represent. In other words, when my house gets on fire, I call the fire department and the firemen will come and help me. I do not refer to them by their names or who they are as persons, in my mind they are representatives of the organization they work for.However during a disaster there is a radical change in our behaviour. The number of organizations involved increases and all of a sudden a coordinated approach is needed. But at this time the organizations become the problem. Political and sometimes financial motives of those organizations hinder them from working efficiently with each other. In the international humanitarian world we often see different UN organizations competing for the attention of the media and the donors instead of collaborating with other organizations involved in the same response. Very often the leadership of those organizations are playing a political game during these periods, something that can realy affect the efficiency of the response. But luckily there is a solution to this problem and in this case it is people. It is people at different levels of the organization which feel human emotions about those affected by the disaster and because of these human emotions are willing to break down and reach out of the organizational silos that they represent. It is through these kind of connection between people within the different organizations that work actually gets done. We must therefore learn to leverage and build up in advance those personal relationships between the people in these organizations.In the third phase, catastrophie, Mileti points out that society breaks down and the basic human instinct of survial kicks in. During this phase relationships no longer matter, only yourself matter. However he points out that lucklily this phase does not last for very long and only happens extreemly seldom.A key point to understand about his findings is that it is not a formal organizational declaration that transititions us between these different phases, but rather it is determined by the behaviour of the people involved.So keep this in mind as I go through the next few slides and discuss methods for effective coordination.
This lead to the UN approaching us at Microsoft two years ago with this particular problem of how to enable efficient information sharing within and between clusters. They had come to the realization that it was simply not enough to provide the organizational structure and the processes that the cluster approach defined, they also needed to provide the platform for sharing that information.We at Microsoft looked at this problem and identified ways in which technology could support this information sharing. As we were in the middle of identifying these things, cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in May 2008. Within a few days a team of volunteers and 19 of our partners worldwide assisted us in building a working prototype of this platform that was used to coordinate the response for the first 12 months. We then took the lessons learned from our work in Myanmar and create a new platform we have chosen to call OneResponse and it is currently being launched and pilotted in a few countries by the UN as their information sharing platform during disasters.This platform also proofed it‘s applicability to different crisis last spring when it was used to create a collaboration platform for the Ministry of Health and other organizations involved in the pandemic outbreak of H1N1 in one of the first countries to experience that pandemic.So again I want to stress the fact that it is not enough to define the organization and define the processes, you must also provide the platforrm to enable effctive coordination and that is where technology can play an important role.
The history of technology can be summarized by decade-long epochs. Starting in the 1960’s with the mainframe, through the rise of departmental mini-computing in the 70s, to the “power to the people” enablement from client-server and the rise of the web in the 90s. The current decade and epoch will be identified by the rapid increase in the 3rd party hosting of software delivered as (software) services.There are many advantages to the hosted software model particularly with the immediacy of global reach, the ease of provisioning and, of course, allowing a 3rd party with the greater expertise to run the computers, networks, data-centers and software on my behalf. However, there are many advantages to running software on premises too. Principally, the ability to tailor the software to most effectively address specific business needs and the level of privacy and control that can only be guaranteed when the software and data are within my control.Role of technology timeline1960 – command & control1970 – mini computing1980’s – client/server, power to the people1990’s – the Web shows up
Rather than debate whether to deploy software on premises or hosted, it is more appropriate, realistic, effective and better serves customers’ and partners’ needs to consider the marriage of the best of software with the best of services. This combination enables the following 5, key attributes and avoids what Steve Ballmer has rather colorfully called “The Tyranny of the ‘OR””.Key attributes of apps in this eraConsistent, seamless experiences across multiple PCs and devicesChoice of on-premise, partner-hosted or Microsoft-hosted deliveryFederation between enterprises and cloud servicesComposition of multiple applications and servicesEnablement of multiple business modelsThis approach is called software-plus-services and is an industry-wide trend…
