Organizational Factors Inhibiting the Design of Effective Emergency Management Information Systems (EMIS)

The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has led to a large number of articles in various news sources attempting to report on the reasons for and consequences of this disaster. We use this literature as a basis for exposing the possible systemic problems in BP that would explain this catastrophe and we offer some conclusions as to what designers should strive to do whenever possible to counter these difficulties. There are a large number of well known problems of organizational structure, behavior, and communications. It is entirely possible that these problems have become more pervasive and common in organizations than we would expect. The enormity of these issues may also contribute to the difficulty of designing and implementing effective Emergency Management Information Systems (EMIS) capable of dealing with all the tasks that such a system must be able to address.