Understanding the role and contribution of inter-organisational information sharing and collaboration to critical infrastructure resilience : a multidimensional investigation

The resilience of Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems has become one of the key elements to assure not only the continuity of operations but the availability of vital functions for modern societies. Considering CI importance, frequent disruptions (caused by natural disasters, terrorist attacks, traffic accidents, system errors, etc.) have forced societies to respond to crisis situations as effectively as possible. CIs have gradually evolved into the patchwork of physical networks, old and new technologies, actor networks and institutions, making a very integrated system of systems. Due to connections and services between CIs, as well as extreme development of ICT control, CIs have become highly interdependent and prone to cascading disruptions. Furthermore, CIs have undergone massive institutional restructuring – privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation. While becoming highly technically interconnected their management has become increasingly institutionally fragmented. Infrastructure systems include both a physical and a social (actor) network and their interaction. Since no single organisation has all the necessary resources, possesses all the relevant information or owns expertise in handling all types of extreme events, information sharing and collaboration have been recognised as a critical part for improving crisis response effectiveness and efficiency (among researchers, infrastructure operators and governmental agencies). Diverse actors and multiple organisations must share information and collaborate in order to effectively protect CIs and ensure their resilience. On the other side, the achievement of collaborative interactions among actors that are highly heterogeneous in organisational structure, crisis management procedures and technological assets, represents a great challenge during the crisis. Furthermore, the diversity among the stakeholders and their organisations leads to numerous organisational and policy issues (e.g. different responsibilities, different/competing priorities) which hinder communication and collaborative efforts between public and private or private and private managers. The characteristics of both the governance model (e.g. type of Public-Private Partnerships) and the operational model are relevant to increase the resilience of CI systems. Current CI Protection and Resilience (CIP/R) approaches proved to be inadequate and with major limitations. Significant problems are arising from the lack of collaboration throughout the phases of Emergency Management. The theoretical and practical aims of this research are:  To theoretically study and empirically confirm barriers and issues to information sharing in context of CIP/R, evaluate ability of emerging concepts to overcome the issues, and contribution of improved collaboration models to CI crisis management and resilience.  To enhance efficiency and effectiveness of CI crisis management in means by improving information sharing and operational collaboration, increasing the level of inter-organisational resilience capabilities and interoperability in a network of regional CI crisis response actors. This work is at the cross-border between technology and management where facts, both deterministic and uncertain, combine with values, beliefs and behaviours. It is not just dealing with technology and robust information sharing, but it is also about human and organisational behaviour. In this light of socio-technical system (STS) perspective, collaborative processes may benefit CI resilience by acting on both system dimensions – Technological (interdependency analysis) and Organisational (Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) & Network Enabled Operations (NEO) concepts). Taking STS position, we have decided that it is appropriate to use mixed methods and approaches, where either approach (used at different stages) could yield valuable data and best meet researchers’ needs and purposes. Accordingly, we have integrated qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques and analysis procedures to strengthen the validity and quality of data analysis and research findings. The first result came from the literature review from which we were able to identify the complete spectrum of barriers and issues to information sharing and collaboration among actors in CI crisis response. The study showed tight connections among the barriers and highlighted the importance of matching organisational structure characteristics, technological capabilities and sociological influence for improving CIP/R. Advocates of SOA and NEO concepts, documented experiments and empirical evidence from the case studies confirm that many of the identified successful practices for information sharing are based on the SOA and NEO principles and pre event experience of working together. In practice, the challenge of CIP/R is faced through formation of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which emerged as a response to the current and upcoming trends affecting infrastructures. In general, PPPs aim to remove existing barriers to collaboration and information sharing while building missing bridges between the actors/organisations and trying to establish needed relationships and interactions. We have empirically analysed, through exploratory-explanatory multiple case study, some of the widely recognised PPP best practices:  Centre Risque and Performance (CRP) in Montreal, Canada;  Louisiana Business Emergency Operations Center, USA;  Pacific NorthWest Economic region (PNWER) – Center for Regional Disaster Resilience in Seattle, USA;  Lombardy Region in Italy. Each of the PPPs managed to channel information flows, increase intensity of shared information, make the information actionable upon, and improve the aspect of CIP/R they have aimed for, still applying NEO/SOA principles in very limited form. We were able to note contribution of PPPs to CIP/R, to identify factors influencing and shaping PPPs, to see how different challenges were faced and solved in an innovative way and, probably the most important – we apprehended the two value chains corresponding to the gaps we have investigated:  The first, where pre-event joint activities and information sharing combined with application of SOA/NEO concepts lead to improved information sharing and collaboration during the response (during-event) phase of EM;  The second, starting from information sharing and collaboration, subsequently enabling actions and activities based on it, and at the end resulting in a set of CIP/R benefits. Even though PPPs are still not able to reach high levels of collaboration and resources sharing they present more advantageous option than applying the traditional approach. The findings affirmed again that PPP presents a comprehensive approach when dealing with CIP/R. We argue that PPPs present an adequate way to tackle CIP/R issues on regional/local level if implemented adequately. Thanks to enhanced information sharing processes among the organisations involved in the incident response it is possible to have improved resilience practices such as preparedness or responsiveness consisting of enhanced anticipation and better situational awareness. Benefits of the reduction in response times were estimated through simulations based on a real snowfall scenario disrupting the transportation system in the metropolitan area of Milan. Simulations have shown that efforts best materialise in benefits locally and indicated the need for joint local actions, based on situational awareness built upon efficient information sharing. Information needs to be shared in specific areas, based on interdependencies identification and analysis, and in this manner the highest benefits can be reached. This approach has been successfully used in practice within PPPs. The dissertation investigated the role and contribution of inter-organisational information sharing and collaboration to improvement of CIP/R. It explained and justified why information sharing deemed and proved to be one of the crucial aspects of modern age CI resilience. It has both expanded academic knowledge in the field and brought benefits to stakeholders/practitioners. Finally, limitations and directions for future research have been outlined.