Johnny DOUVINET, Avignon University, France
An effective alert must provide timely information that helps people prepare adequately for an emergency or disaster. However, there is great diversity in the implementation of this process, particularly in areas of alerts, the doctrine, the number of stakeholders authorised to disseminate alerts, the modes of communication and the dissemination tools used. Space and time factors can also complexity the decision, as the hazard area differ from administrative responsibilities and the time for decision and activation does not equal to the time of hazard and impacts arrival.
Since the early 2000s, changes in alerting systems have opened up new challenges and issues in the fields of crisis management. Social networks, mobile telephony, the Internet of things and cell-broadcast and real-time information systems have improved the suitability of tools and unpredictability of risks (Houston et al. 2015, Poslad et al. 2015). Over time, many countries have developed effective national warnings systems using these technologies. However, changes seem to be driven by political choices, by pitfalls observed after major events or following the failure of certain tools. This raises the question: do alerting tools change the way organisations operate or does the evolution of organisations require changes in the system?
To answer this, the national Location-Based Alerting Systems of 54 countries were analyzed, by using methods derived from the contingency theory (Burns & Stalker 1969). We focused on ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘for what’ and ‘how to evolve’ questions and postulate that: national alerting systems depend on the structure and inherited governance more than on social and cultural characteristics of people or risks; technological improvements in warning systems are leading to their mutation as some countries appear more advanced than others in the use of new warning technologies (i.e. cell-broadcast in the USA since 2006, social networks in Indonesia since 2011).
Mots clés : alert|space|times|LBAS
A103081JD