Designing Decision Support Systems for Humanitarian Organisations

Abstract

The first step to ensure the success of applications in a specific field consists in producing a complete and representative model of the studied system. This alignment with reality is not easy to achieve though. This is particularly true in the humanitarian context, as in all new research areas, where researchers have difficulty identifying the right decision variables and parameters to be able to develop accurate and relevant models. At the same time, the uncertainty of the humanitarian operational environment does not facilitate data collection and analysis. This gap is true for many applications in the humanitarian sector, including research on ICT. This paper proposes an overview of the requirements and issues linked with the designing of decision support systems for humanitarian organisations.