Smart checklists for crises management planning

Planning in crises management is essential in order to guide operation staff through noise and chaos and to counter stress, panic and overburdening of emergency services. This planning results in so called standard operating procedures (SOP), sketched out by legislations and handbooks, and adapted to local directives and conditions. These SOPs are learned, trained and also condensed to checklists, with print-outs placed in emergency vehicles and control centres for permanent availability. But, planning is not a product, but a process. So far, scant IT support is available to support the process of emergency planning. Emergency services have to rely on Office tools for creating and managing these guidelines, resulting in MS Word documents for a written description and Excel or Word tables for checklists. In this paper we present our concept of smart checklists and its first implementation, which enables emergency service organisations to design and exchange plans in terms of IT-supported checklists. A checklist resembles a light-weight process representation giving users the freedom to sketch their processes while maintaining sufficient formalization.