The myth of business process modelling for emergency management planning

Over the last two decades a significant number of projects tried to convey the concept of business process man-agement to the domain of emergency management. Most of these approaches sought a partial automation for the execution of standard operating procedures in the sense of workflow support, while others strived for the sup-port and integration of information management and data streams in command centres during a crisis. This pa-per focuses on the planning of disaster response for reasons of better preparedness. It discusses whether emer-gency management organisations can capitalize on off-the-shelf business process modelling tools to prepare for disasters more effectively, and whether the concepts of process modelling can be applied to standard operating procedures and vice versa. Moreover, it investigates whether such tools can efficiently support a collaborative preparation of police, fire departments, and rescue organizations. This paper will demonstrate why conventional business process means are inapplicable as planning tool in this domain. And it will also give an outlook to so called smart checklists that might be better suited both for the planning and response phase of emergency episodes.