STOMP: A NOVEL FRAMEWORK FOR CATEGORISING AND EVALUATING EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT (EM) TOOLS

Emergency Management (EM) encompasses the lifecycle of activities before, during, and after a crisis, involving mechanisms to identify vulnerabilities, respond effectively, and restore normalcy. Supporting these efforts, various tools address phases from preparedness training to decision-making during crisis response. This paper introduces the Strategic Tactical Operational Matrix prototype (STOMp), a novel framework for evaluating commercially available EM tools and European Commission (EC)-funded security projects. This framework, co-created with EM practitioners, employs a review process to compare tool capabilities against defined requirements, focusing on the EM lifecycle phases, decision-making levels, and practitioner needs. The analysis identifies undersupplied services and functionality gaps, revealing areas where tools fail to meet EM demands. These insights provide a foundation for designing future toolsets with enhanced functionality and support, offering a mechanism for requirements comparison and validation to bridge existing gaps. This study highlights the critical need for evaluation frameworks like STOMp to inform the development of robust EM capabilities.