A Training Approach to Improving Knowledge Management in Organizations

Knowledge is considered an essential intangible asset in organizations and when adequately managed it can be adapted to respond to changing circumstances when disaster occurs. Knowledge acquired in the emergency management domain improves an organisation's emergency response against incidents. Providing the appropriate quality training in emergencies to all those involved and being aware of the capability level of the human resources are vital factors in emergency response. The Quality of Emergency Plan Management framework (QuEP) contains a set of maturity levels to assess and improve all the activities concerning the implementing and management of emergency plans with IT support tools. The different stakeholders, such as managers, planners, workers, responders and citizens are all involved. Focusing on the QuEP theoretical training approach, organizations need to implement a framework for training and decision-making in emergency management. In this paper we propose knowledge management through the implementation of the Continuous Improvement for Emergency Management Training (CiET) framework for customizing training in different phases of emergency management activities ( pre-disaster, response, post-disaster), such as emergency drills, training personnel, protecting workers, among others. Training helps to prepare organizations and provides contextual and non-contextual information to the participants on how to respond to incidents and recover normal activity as quickly as possible. Knowledge management improves context-sensitiveness, increases stakeholders' awareness, supports decision-making, improves personnel training and increases the quality of emergency plans. We here describe how CiET can provide knowledge and transform it through the decision-making process and propose the CiET-Decision Making for Emergency Management (CiETDM) support tool. Through a case study it is presented as CiET-DM manages the results of evaluation training and transforms feedback into knowledge that can be shown on a dashboard with the main indicators of the results of learning objectives while supporting decision-making to improve stakeholder training.