Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Walter Castelnovo
Risk assessment, and risk treatment as well, can be made more efficient and effective when
information concerning previous experiences can be used to derive useful insights on how to treat the
case at hand. One way to do this is by allowing the use of tools that enable groups to jointly create
and share content; WIKIs are typical collaborative tools that can be used to this end, even in critical
contexts (as those described in (Wagner 2004) and (Andrus 2005)). In the processing of a SCIA,
blogs can be used to make a shared risk assessment and a shared risk treatment strategy emerge
from the collaborative effort of people belonging to different organizations (as well as to different units
within the same organization); WIKIs, instead, can be used to document the whole risk assessment
and risk treatment processes for that SCIA. The intrinsic collaborative nature of the WIKI enables
documents to be written collectively by all the people involved in the risk management and the risk
treatment processes (whatever organization they belong to), thus allowing a more structured,
complete, reliable and useful documentation of the way a SCIA has been treated. Moreover, the
possibility of using tags (both content tags and meta-information tags) and links to organize the
content of WIKI pages makes it particularly easier to find the information needed, thus allowing a
more efficient use of past experiences in both the risk assessment and the risk treatment processes.
From this point of view, by using WIKIs to document the risk management processes also the
requirement A3 in figure 3 above can be satisfied.
4. Conclusions
In the paper I considered the opportunity of using SCSs to make inter-organizational risk
management efficient and effective, especially in contexts in which there are strict temporal
requirements to satisfy. In the discussion I did not consider neither the technical aspects of SCSs nor
the challenges that the adoption of SCSs poses for organizations, both at the technical and at the
managerial level. Despite these challenges, the number of successful examples of enterprises and
government organizations adopting SCSs is continuously growing and the success conditions for
SCSs adoption are becoming more and more clear. In particular, the best practices show that the
highest chances of success depend on the integration of the new tools within existing workflows and
on their application to the core activities of the organization, so that their use is not perceived by the
employees simply as another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.
Risk management represents a central component of any organisation’s strategic management; from
this point of view, the one discussed in the paper represents an interesting case for the application of
SCSs. Moreover, in the paper risk management has been considered from the perspective of interorganizational
cooperation; in the present interconnected world organizations will be more and more
involved in inter-organizational cooperation. Thus, the problems discussed here, as well as the
solutions suggested, are likely to be more and more central for organizations. Finally, the adoption of
the new participatory technologies and tools within the TRM model exemplified in section 3 is such
that the SCSs are directly integrated within existing workflows, thus satisfying also this success
condition for the organizations’ adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.
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