Establishing Technical Guidelines Before Procuring IT Solutions for Crisis Management

This paper presents a technical guideline framework to inform joint-cross border Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) decisions for Information Technology (IT) solutions in crisis management, with a specific focus on EO-driven water resilience across the EU to improve situational awareness and provide better decision support. Grounded in co-designed User Story Lines (USL) that reflect operational scenarios (floods, wildfires, infrastructure impacts), the approach prioritizes open standards, open-source components, and operational readiness at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 8. We synthesize state-of-the-art practices for PCP in crisis IT, report initial outputs such as evaluation criteria, a candidate inventory, and capability-based shortlists; and outline next steps for documentation, adoption monitoring, and standardization pathways. The contribution is a practical, reusable guideline and governance model that reduces vendor lock-in risk, accelerates integration, and strengthens cross-border crisis information flows.