Readily Available Digital Technologies in the Age of Pandemics

Abstract

Digital technologies and information systems have played a pivotal role during the past SARS pandemic and continue to assist with the recovery process during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the technologies themselves have advanced significantly and allow ready access and ease of use to individuals, organizations, and communities. We focus on a set of such technologies – Readily Available Digital Technologies (RADT) – and show how they assist during various phases of management of the ongoing crisis. We utilize an existing crisis management framework and emphasize the role and impact of RADTs. Furthermore, we extend the crisis management framework to include a resilience phase and explore examples from extant academic and practitioner literature to demonstrate its applicability in the current context. We invite future researchers to build further on our exploratory framework and highlight its potential contributions.