New technologies, new challenges: information management, coordination and agency independence

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Publication details

Publisher(s)	Overseas Development Institute (2002)
Author(s)	Robin Schofield

Description

As donors press for more centralised coordination models, field agencies ignore the ramifications of new technologies at their peril.

Humanitarians still see information management as peripheral to relief activities. The ReliefWeb symposium on ‘Best Practice in Humanitarian Information Management and Exchange’, held in Geneva in February 2002, typified this ‘ghettoisation’ of information management within the emergency aid sector.

Despite ReliefWeb’s best efforts to encourage wider participation, the four-day meeting was dominated by UN agencies and northern donors, with delegates almost exclusively technical specialists, with very few field workers, and little representation from the media or the military. While delegates debated expert resources, data standards and deployment challenges at length, they did not tackle the wider issues around information technology and management. As symposium coordinator Dennis King put it, ‘I hope for a time when information management will be integrated into everybody’s work, but at the moment it is still considered specialised’.