Speaker 1: � Greetings, I'm Christopher Rice. Welcome to Cyber Focus, your source for international business information. I'm happy to introduce our guest today, Dr. Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez. Dr. Pedraza-Martinez is Associate Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, focusing on logistics, supply chain management, and humanitarian operations. He holds a PhD in management from INSEAD, master's degrees in management and economics, and a bachelor's in industrial engineering. Dr. Pedraza-Martinez is the president of the College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management with the Production and Operations Management Society. His award-winning research on humanitarian operations management has informed the practice of logistics at the Red Cross movement, World Food Program, and World Vision International. In this edition of Cyber Focus, Dr. Pedraza-Martinez will discuss recent events in disaster management, best practices in management and operations, and the best role you as an individual can play in helping with disasters. Alfonso, thanks a lot for coming in. Thanks, Chris, for inviting me. In much of your research, you discuss the disaster management cycle. Could you explain what components go into this cycle and what issues organizations run into in managing it?

Speaker 2: Yes, the disaster management cycle has four phases or stages. You can start with disaster preparedness. Once there is a credible threat or a warning of potential disaster, communities begin to prepare. If you think about hurricanes, once a hurricane forms in the Caribbean, there is a probable trajectory that is calculated by weather scientists, and based on that, communities begin to prepare to face that potential threat. Of course, it may not materialize. The hurricane may change direction, and everything stays on preparedness. But when it happens, when one of these events actually materializes and affects a community, then we have the disaster response. This will be the second phase of the disaster management cycle. During disaster response, the idea is to mitigate the suffering of victims. You need to be fast. You need to help as many people as you can in the shortest amount of time possible. Once you are done with this response to disaster, then you have the recovery. It's a longer phase than response. The response may be 72 hours to a week, depending on the type of disaster, but recovery may take several months. And that's to bring the community back to their standards of life before the disaster. And after recovery, then you will have mitigation of future disasters. So there are different actions in mitigation. If you think again about hurricanes, after Hurricane Sandy, for example, in 2012, some communities in the New York area were relocated because it was clear that they would face future threats as dangerous or more dangerous than Hurricane Sandy due to their location. So that's mitigation. By mitigation, you may also have the actions of fortifying facilities for future disasters. So you, for example, make your infrastructure hurricane-resistant or earthquake-resistant, or you relocate your facilities and so forth. So those would be the four stages. Preparedness is typically relatively short term, same as response, but recovery and mitigation

Speaker 1: last much longer. Quite a while. And the mitigation, as a cycle, it feeds back in, right, to preparedness?

Speaker 2: Exactly, because better mitigation now will definitely help better preparedness and better response in the future.

Speaker 1: Technological advances in social media are affecting the operations world in many ways, one of which is in dealing with humanitarian disasters. Can you talk about how social media has changed the disaster management cycle and how organizations should use it?

Speaker 2: Yes. The inclusion of social media in the portfolio of information choices of organizations for disaster management actually gives organizations much more information. But then some of this information is useful and some of this information is not that useful. So it's challenging for organizations to figure out what information is useful and what to do with that useful information. I have a paper with one of my colleagues here in IU, one of my colleagues in information systems, and we look at the use of Facebook for disaster management. So we have five organizations, including the American Red Cross and FEMA and some others, and we look at the social conversation, meaning the interaction of these organizations with their users over the cycle of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. And what we find there is that these organizations at that time were posting mostly for the victims of the disaster. So they were telling about preparedness actions they were taking. Later, they were telling about response actions, such as we are delivering meals or there are sheltering options here and there. But interestingly, they were engaging potential donors and volunteers. And these potential donors and volunteers were asking how can I help? And they were also asking where can I donate? But perhaps due to lack of resources at the time and the overwhelming increase in demand for information, these organizations tended not to follow up with answers to potential volunteers and donors. And the issue with that is that if you don't tell me anything, I would probably go and donate anyway, and I may not donate to the best organization, or I may go and volunteer and I may not be very skillful. So I may, you know, like make a mistake or I may become a victim of the disaster myself. So our recommendation is that yes, you need to post information for victims and you need to interact with victims, but you cannot forget potential donors and volunteers. Now, if you don't have the resources to engage in social conversation with all the users you are getting information from on Facebook, you can focus on the ones that are located closer to the disaster area. Because these are the ones that have the highest probability to go to a disaster area to help or to donate.

Speaker 1: Great. Alfonso, when people see humanitarian disasters around the world, and you've just alluded to this, many people want to jump in to help, whether that's physically or through donations. While this is admirable, sometimes it's not the most effective way to assist the operation. What are the best ways for an individual to assist in humanitarian operations?

Speaker 2: So the answer will be it depends on who you are. If you are a skillful volunteer and you know what you're doing and you're affiliated to an organization, you probably will be deployed there to help, which is great. But if you aren't as much of us, like the majority of people are not skillful volunteers for disaster response, then yes, maybe your first inclination will be to go there and do something. Because you see people suffering and you feel like I must do something. And many people take action and just go to the disaster area without having the skills or the preparation to go there. And that's a problem in itself because this influx of volunteers may end up creating more victims, right? So you go there, you don't know the area, you are not prepared, you don't have food, water, etc. You may become a victim and then you start to consume resources that were originally planned to help the victims of the disaster. So if you want to volunteer, perhaps if you are not a skillful volunteer and you are not affiliated to like an organized response, you can do it close to the area where you live. Don't forget that when there is a disaster, many communities send help, right? So sending means there is a point of origin and a point of destination. You don't need to go to a point of destination, you can do it at the point of origin. So help with shipments, help organizing the logistics where you live. You will be safe and you will still be helping. Now if what you want to do is donate, then you can use the time to figure out what are the best organizations to donate to. You can think about going for large organizations like the American Red Cross through their website, or you can go to crowdfunding campaigns that have to do with disaster response. So in my research, I've seen that in crowdfunding campaigns, the ones that tend to deliver the most are the ones that give operational updates of what they are doing. When I say operational updates, it's updates that relate to the work they are doing. So those are good crowdfunding campaigns to donate to in the aftermath of a disaster. So instead of trying to just jump there without really knowing what you're doing, perhaps the best is to stay at home, inform yourself very well, and try to help with your local community. Great, great.

Speaker 1: You've referenced many best practices so far. Do you see differences in best practices for humanitarian operation management when you look at severity of the disaster, or if the operation has resulted from a natural disaster versus an armed conflict?

Speaker 2: Yes, there are many differences there, and some are fundamental. The first one is when we talk about humanitarian, there are three principles that need to be respected. You need to be neutral, impartial, and human. You need to offer help with dignity to victims. And neutral is an issue in conflicts, right, because you need to help both sides of the conflict. So typically, if you are not like a humanitarian organization, you may take sides when you're helping. So that is a difference with natural disasters. And also in natural disasters, you need to be impartial. You need to help everybody the same, independent on their race, religion, gender, and so forth. And that's also a challenge. Now, when it comes to a type of disasters, if you think about large disasters that have a lot of attention, they tend to receive lots of donations. And all those donations make the response less challenging in terms of resources. It is still logistically very challenging to respond to a very large disaster, but you may have the resources. If we are talking about less publicized disasters and local disasters and so forth, you may face way more scarce resources. So you have more constraints when it comes to your operation. Now, if we go to a side of armed conflict, then a big issue here is that you need to worry about the safety and security of your own staff members. So if you are an organization trying to do humanitarian work in a disaster area, you need to be very careful because the safety and security of your own staff should be your first priority. Now, if you are a local organization providing disaster response in an area of armed conflict, you may have some issues, but you also add some value that others cannot. For example, if you're a rural hospital in an area of armed conflict, you develop, or your staff members, your medical staff, develop these skills that are unique to the area and the conflict that help them respond better. But on the other side, you know, they may suffer from exhaustion and may also become victims of disaster themselves.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Alfonso, thank you so much. Very interesting. Sure. You're welcome. Thanks for inviting me. That's all for this edition of Cyber Focus. Thank you for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, please let us know at cyber, that's C-I-B-E-R, cyber, at indiana.edu.