Disaster management digitally transformed: Exploring the impact and key determinants from the UK national disaster management experience

Abstract

With the increasing social and economic devastation caused by disasters around the world, the international community and country-level National Disaster Management (NDM) authorities have placed improving their ways to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters as a top priority. Technological advancements and the 4th Industrial Revolution are critical tools to help achieve this. However, they also present many challenges to traditional NDM systems by altering the fundamental operational, organizational, and social dynamics of conventional disaster management. Currently, there is a lack of research that studies these aspects beyond technology and examines the impact of digital transformation on the full life cycle of disaster management on the national level. Therefore, this research fills this gap by integrating interdisciplinary concepts from different research fields including Disaster Management, Information Systems, and Business Management to understand the impact and determinants of digital transformation in NDM systems. To achieve this, the research uses the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework and conducts semi-structured interviews with UK NDM experts. The results show that the impact of digital transformation on NDM is profound, paradoxical, multi-directional, and driven by a multitude of driving forces. This research makes many significant contributions to research and practice. Theoretically, this research expands the TOE framework beyond its original underpinnings by uncovering a new set of disaster-context determinants. It also presents an innovative Layered Cake FAST (Foundations-Approach-Strategy-Technology) Model that offers a unique roadmap for NDM on how to handle its digital transformation journey. Practically, the research presents several sets of useful expert-recommended actions.

Digital leadership in business organizations

“…Likewise, Zamora (IESE Department of Information Systems Professor) states that digital leaders need to be aware of behavioral, socioeconomic shifts driven by new technology, including mobile, social, private, public clouds, and largescale data. Strong leaders are expected to know the company strategy's transformation, similar to a traditional balancing interpreter for management and digitalization (AlHinai, 2020;Büyüközkan et al, 2021).…”

Value co-creation in the B2B context: a conceptual framework and its implications

“…The researchers examined the information systems and service literature, including the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Work Systems Theory (WST), to find relevant theory and frameworks. The TOE framework was chosen for its wide coverage in the literature and its adaptability in a new context (AlHinai, 2020;Awa & Ojiabo, 2016;Oliveira et al, 2019). Designed by Tornatzky et al (1990), TOE focuses on three elements of the firm:…”

“…Teo et al, 2006), e-business diffusion (e.g. Lin & Lin, 2008) and digital transformation (AlHinai, 2020). The freedom to vary the factors or measures for each new research context makes it highly adaptable (Baker, 2012).…”

Unleashing the potential of digital technologies in emergency supply chain: the moderating effect of crisis leadership

“…Digital transformation has changed the ways disaster relief efforts were carried out in the past (Dubey et al, 2019(Dubey et al, , 2021AlHinai, 2020;Queiroz and Fosso Wamba, 2021;Fosso Wamba, 2020), but there is a limited conceptual study that how the organizations leverage these digital technologies (DTs) in the highly chaotic environment (Khan et al, 2018). In this study, the author argues DTs based on Warner and Wager (2019, p. 328), "as a combination of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies".…”