The interest in mobile information technology for emergency response (ER) comes from the simple fact that an important part of this work is done in the field. With little or no infrastructure to rely on, ER operatives have to make do with the tools they bring along. Of course, ER organizations build, invest in and do rely on infrastructure for their operations and this includes sophisticated stationary information technology. The systems used for dispatching ER units are a good example for this. While such systems are very important to support strategic planning and decision making, the effects of emergency response work eventually have to be created on site. And this includes both obtaining the information required for taking informed decisions as well as implementing decisions through targeted actions in the field. All of this is of course not new. The tradeoff between responding quickly with the available resources to the situation at hand and responding with more deliberation to strategic goals and constraints is not inherent to the use of information technology but to responding to emergencies in general. What is new is that current and foreseeable innovations in mobile information technology have the potential to offer substantially better support for emergency response field work, resulting in better solutions for this trade-off. By providing better gathering, communication and processing of relevant information between all actors involved, we believe that mobile information technology can be a valuable tool in the hands of ER professionals to increase the speed, precision, efficiency and effectiveness of their operations.

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