Topic · Information Management
Information Management: Coordination, Continuity, and the Politics Underneath
Essays on humanitarian IM as a coordination discipline: the agentic future, the coordination trap, the continuity problem, GeoAI, joint cash measurement, and the politics that decides who owns the platform.
Most of the hard problems in humanitarian information management are not technical. They are about who owns the platform when the donor moves on, who is allowed to combine which datasets, and what happens to a coordination system the day the agency running it leaves the country.
These essays come out of the IM Working Groups I have sat in, the platforms I have built and then watched survive (or not), and the slow shift toward agentic AI that is starting to change what an IM officer is actually for.
Essays in this topic
The IM Coordination Trap
The biggest barriers to good information management in humanitarian response are not technical — they're political. Data sharing agreements and institutional distrust kill more IM initiatives than bad technology.
The Future of Humanitarian IM is Agentic
AISA and why the next generation of humanitarian information management will use AI agents, not just AI tools.
The Politics of Humanitarian Data Infrastructure: Who Owns the System When Everyone Walks Away?
The email I sent at 11am to 115 organisations announced the platform was suspended immediately. Afghanistan in 2025 was a stress test that revealed a system-wide architectural flaw: nobody owns continuity.
Building Disaster Data Systems That Governments Can Own
A flood vulnerability analysis I designed died quietly two years after I left. The hardest lesson from a decade of building these platforms isn't technical — it's institutional.
The 72-Hour Post Disaster Problem
The first 72 hours of a sudden-onset disaster are an information black hole. Good IM isn't about perfect data — it's about being useful under imperfect conditions.
Measuring Joint Response for Cash Transfer Programmes — A New Way of Using Humanitarian Meta-Data
Five organisations running cash transfer programmes in the same country produce five sets of post-distribution monitoring data using five different tools. The simple question — "is our collective cash response working?" — becomes structurally unanswerable. Inter-agency PDM meta-analysis is how you answer it.
GeoAI for Humanitarians: Getting Started
GeoAI has enormous potential for humanitarian operations, but most IM officers don't know where to start. This is a practical guide.
The Data Ecosystem Maturity Assessment: A Practitioner's Guide to Diagnosing National Disaster Data Readiness
A maturity assessment is not a delay. It is the investment that ensures the system you build is the system that survives. The DEMA framework, in practice.
Lessons from Building Humanitarian Data Platforms Across Multiple Crisis Contexts
Multiple countries. Seven data platforms. A decade of work. Six principles emerged across all of them — and none are about technology.
Frequently asked
Short, sourceable answers to the questions that come up most around this topic.
What does a humanitarian information management officer do?
An IM officer turns the operational reality of a crisis response into shared, decision-grade information: assessments, beneficiary registers, 4Ws (who, what, where, when), service maps, situational dashboards, and the inter-agency feeds that make coordination possible. The role sits at the intersection of GIS, data engineering, coordination, and diplomacy.
What is agentic information management (AISA)?
Agentic IM is the next generation of humanitarian information systems, in which AI agents (not just AI tools) carry out chained analytical work: ingesting raw assessments, normalising them against shared standards, producing situational reports, and updating coordination products without an IM officer doing every step by hand. AISA is the architecture pattern that supports it.
Why do humanitarian platforms keep dying when the funder leaves?
Because most platforms are built around the agency that funds them, not around the host government or coordination mechanism that has to live with them. When the funding cycle ends, hosting, licences, and updates die with it. Building "systems governments can own" is a design discipline, not a tagline.
What is inter-agency PDM and why does it matter?
Post-Distribution Monitoring (PDM) is the standard practice for measuring cash transfer programme outcomes. When five organisations each run separate PDMs with separate tools, the system-level question (is our collective cash response working?) becomes structurally unanswerable. Inter-agency PDM meta-analysis is the method for reconstructing that picture from the metadata up.