Organizational Resilience and Using Information and Communication Technologies to Rebuild Communication Structures

ICTs and Resilience

Adapting existing routines, including ICT use, which may in turn lead to modifications or even creation of new routines, is one way organizations may enact resilience during crisis. Technology-in-practice (Orlikowsi, 2000)—the idea that the utility of a technology lies in the way that it is used rather than the technology itself—can illuminate why an ICT that had no real role in an organization before crisis might become the backbone of its technological structure following crisis. Technology-in-practice “focuses on emergent technology structures enacted in practice rather than embodied structures fixed in technologies” (Orlikowski, 2000, p. 408). According to this view, users do not appropriate technologies, but enact them. They “repeatedly enact a set of rules and resources which structures their ongoing interactions with that technology” (Orlikowski, 2000, p. 407). So, using ICTs in context can result in a reinforced sense of traditional communication patterns, or the creation of new organizational communication and technological structures. As people respond to the altered conditions created by disaster, they constitute and reconstitute both their communication and technological structures by adapting ICTs to access the resources and contacts necessary for recovery (e.g., Carey, 2003; Sutton, Palen, & Shklovski, 2008).

There is also evidence that using not only one, but multiple, technologies together can help people enact recovery following disaster. Katz and Rice (2002) found that in a crisis, people develop ad hoc solutions using a variety of media in order to maintain contact with their network. During the events of September 11, a mother who was vacationing out of the country used a combination of phone and email at an Internet café to ascertain that her daughter and extended family were safe (Katz & Rice, 2002). This combination of technologies allowed her to span international boundaries to make sure that her network was intact. People were able to inform loved ones trapped in the World Trade Center based on what they saw on television, and vice versa (Dutton & Nainoa, 2003). This “interdependence” of technology use in a disaster situation implies that using multiple ICTs is more beneficial than using a single device (Dutton & Nainoa, 2003). By adapting their ICT use to fit the circumstances of use, individuals are constituting emergent technological structures.

These studies jointly emphasize ICT use in adapting to disaster related circumstances. Reconnecting and sharing information, support, and other resources were key to individual recovery following disaster. However, the question of whether and how ICTs can aid organizational resilience following a disaster has been less explored. Organizational resilience emphasizes innovation, creativity, and adaptability. This study brings resilience to the organizational level and provides a framework for understanding what elements of technology work as well as how they can help in organization recovery. Therefore, we ask the following research question (RQ):

The technology-in-practice framework suggests how organizations can use already existing technological resources to achieve the flexibility considered necessary for resilience. Flexibility has the potential to help organizations recover and offers the opportunity for positive change and new enactment of technological structures in the organization. To explore if and how ICT use in the postdisaster context leads to new or altered technological structures, we ask the following RQ:

Because disaster conditions vary in severity, there may be situations in which technology is unavailable. While such technological breakdowns are likely to be temporary, they are also likely to happen immediately following disaster. In other cases, organizations may not already rely on technology and therefore may not have a technological infrastructure in place when crisis hits. To illuminate if and how organizations enact resilience without ICT, we ask the following RQ:

Data Analysis

As part of the larger project, the constant comparative technique was applied to interviews to create inductively a coding scheme for multiple coders to apply. Over 1,500 pages of interviews were assessed over a 2-year period by a team of seven people. Once the coding scheme was developed, it was applied to all of the interviews in AtlasTi, a data analysis program that allows for review of data in a variety of ways, including as whole documents, chunks, by code, or by quotation. Being able to view the data in such a way allows for comparison of emergent themes. Dissection of documents in these ways was used to compare how codes were used within and among documents, including by quantity, association with other codes, and similarity and differences among stories. Treatment of the text using constant comparison allows for analysis, rather than description, of the phenomenon being studied. Each transcript was coded by two coders, but to avoid intrateam biases, coding partners varied.

ICT use was operationalized by combining the following codes ¹ to create a supercode, ICT-Use: landline phone; mobile texting; mobile talking; email; blog/website; phone; one-way (e.g., bulletin or some mass communication announcement that has no feedback loop to support reciprocation); and media. By using these codes as search terms, quotations associated with these codes were culled from the entire corpus and assessed for themes. As existing definitions of resilience vary in scope and focus (Bruneau et al., 2002; Horne & Orr, 1998; Kendra, 2001; Weick, 1993), we focused on the element of adaptability, as that is an overlapping theme among all studies for resilience. Accordingly, text associated with the ICT-Use supercode was first studied for instances of ICT use that enabled adaptability. Once general themes had been derived, the ICT-Use supercode was combined with other codes from the coding scheme in order to examine specific research questions. Table 1 details the codes associated with each RQ.

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Table 1.

Codes Used.

Research question	Codes
RQ1a: How do organizations use ICTs to enact organizational resilience following disaster?	ICT Use, 2.3.1 functioned at a distance
RQ1b: What impact does postdisaster ICT use have on organizations’ technological structures?	ICT Use, 5.2 new disaster, 14 creativity, 5.7 predisaster
RQ2: How do organizations enact resilience in the absence of ICTs?	ICT Use, 2.3.2 functioned only locally, not useful, FtF, 6.0 Tie activation prior to return, immediately upon return, after settled in
RQ3: How does postdisaster organizational ICT use reflect the phases of recovery?	ICT Use, 28 evacuation tales, 24 initial renetworking, 26.3 recovery plan, 6.0 Tie activation prior to return, immediately upon return, after settled in
RQ4: To what extent do organizations retain patterns of ICT use enacted during disaster recovery?	ICT Use, 26.3 recovery plan

Note: RQ = research question; ICT = information and communication technology; ICTs = information and communication technologies.

ICT Use and Resilience

RQ1a asked how organizations used ICTs to enact resilience. Three themes emerged: Coordinating contacts; coordinating resources; and enacting work routines.

Coordinating contacts

ICTs were crucial to establishing first contact, as well as for maintaining an open line of communication as recovery continued. While reestablishing contact one-on-one was often accomplished through texting, a series of connections with both new and old network members took place on a mass-communication level when organizations used their websites as a place for internal and external stakeholders to check-in and communicate (Table 2, FamEntertain-16) and used both their own and others’ email address books to establish connections (Table 2, Nonprofit-29[a]). Essentially, ICTs allowed organizations to reconnect across distance and with many stakeholders at once. In the case of mass outreach via websites or blogs, ICTs even allowed people to (re)connect and expand networks with network members whose location was unknown. That is, as long as network members or other audiences were checking the Internet, they could reconnect with the business, or connect for the first time, despite the fact that each other’s location, email address, and telephone number were unknown.

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Table 2.

Resilience Through Information and Communication Technology Use.

Organizations	Quotations
FamEntertain-16	The website and the chat room was open. Some portion of the chat room was open to anyone, and we had lots of people that did contact, that went onto the site that were familiar with us, that wanted to find out if we were okay, or they could do anything for us or whatever. But then we had other sections that were just for the employees, where the employees could go in to get information and we could get information from them.
Nonprofit-29(a)	Now, of course, at the time when I emailed, we were all over the map because we were evacuated. That was in November. And asked that they email to everyone in their address book. And so I got a lot of responses from people that I didn’t know who they were and wanted to join in.
Prof/Legal-13	Considering that you can get just about anything on the Internet, I’ve already replaced some things via the Internet from places that I had no idea would have supplied that sort of thing. So it works, it’s just that it takes longer to get here.
Prof/Legal-62	I learned through email and voice mail that most of my employees had scattered, literally, to the four corners of the country—Florida, New York, one person went up to Seattle, and a lot of people went to Texas. So really not knowing, and I was at the time in Tennessee, we evacuated to Tennessee, and then made plans, knowing we couldn’t return home any time soon, to go to Atlanta where we lived with a brother and I was able to set up a place to work in his office.
Association-3	I communicate on a couple of online chat groups of innkeepers nationwide and one of those, a group . . . because it was a month before we could come back, one of the people on one of those groups took up a collection amongst her state association and just sent us a check. I think it ended being like US$1800.
ProfConsult-56	And it was amazing the people you found on the Internet that, again, you’ve never met before, but that would drop by your house, some policeman or whatever. We did use nola.com, but a lot of cases I was just emailing people I knew or things like that.
Nonprofit-29(b)	The first time I went on the radio . . . a local photographer heard me announcing, “Look, I’m doing this out of my personal email address. I don’t have a website.” He set up the website, . . . . And then it was regular, I needed to add new information regularly, and he had his own job and he wasn’t doing it. I was like, “We have to figure something else out.” So my brother-in-law set up [the website] and I do the text.
Prof/Legal-6	. . .my children’s school started a blog, and that helped tremendously because then we knew what was going to happen. My husband’s company finally reached him by text messaging his phone, his cell phone, because text messaging worked. Cell phones didn’t. You couldn’t talk to anybody, but you could text message . . . my husband’s company, and those were the biggest factors for us in terms of coming back.
Nonprofit-40	[My husband] emailed everybody in his address book. And a lot of my friends and some of the prime members and people in the organization would get his address book. So then I started getting emails from them, because I didn’t have people’s cell phones. . . . Once the word started getting around the network in DC and all the agencies that we deal with that they could get in touch with us, they started calling my house to see how we were and what we were doing and where we were going to go and. . . .
Corp/LgProfit-23	And we would have meetings twice a day. And [work contacts] would call down at 10 o’clock and at 3 o’clock every day. We set up a hotline and [employees] from all across our footprint, Alabama, Pensacola, would call in and we would go through a checklist, just like a pilot’s checklist flying an F-18. What’s working? What could be better? What problems are we having? You know, so and so.
FamEntertain-30	But we normally have Wednesday morning meets here, and so I asked people to consider Wednesday morning as our meeting time and to email each other reports on what they’d been doing, because they were getting paid, to share what path they were working on and what they’d been doing, any updates they had personally.
Prof/Consult-15	R: I wrote [the proposal] while I was in Houston, [colleague A] was in Atlanta, [colleague B] was in Atlanta, [colleague C] was in Baton Rouge, so we wrote it. All the Internet . . . back and forth. I: Track changes. R: That’s exactly right. And that’s how we did it. And then we, this was in October, and then we were awarded it at the end of October.

Rebuilding Technological Structure

RQ1b asked about the impact of postdisaster ICT use on organizations’ technological structures. When segmenting the ICT supercode by the code “creativity,” three subthemes emerged: adopting texting for business use; utilizing websites and blogs for two-way communication; and piggybacking ICT use. Additionally, email, while not a new or creative use of ICT, was a staple in communication following Katrina. These four subthemes represented the ways in which organizations enacted the three main themes (coordinating contacts, coordinating resources, and enacting work routines) using ICT.

Text messaging for business use

Texting was not one of the most frequently mentioned media for communicating, but it was a useful way to communicate when other ICTs were not working. Therefore, the counts associated with the ICT do not reflect the importance imparted on it by the participants who utilized it. Participants reported never having used texting before, not being familiar with it, or figuring it out because someone sent them a text (something they had never received before; Table 3, FamEntertain-12, Advocacy-24). Despite the learning curve, texting was lauded as the primary form of communicating when landline and mobile phones were not working.

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Table 3.

Rebuilding Technological Structures.

Organizations	Quotations
FamEntertain-12	We used cell phones, which were basically ineffective initially and then . . . the thing that was working was the text messages. They worked throughout and we were able to use some of those. The challenge there was that a lot of people were not familiar with using text messages to communicate, so we just had a capacity issue there.
Advocacy-24	I actually got a 901 number in Memphis because the 504 numbers were down or not working. . . . So text messaging was actually the only way you could connect. A lot of people didn’t have access to the Internet, so email wasn’t really the best.
Restaurant/Bar-28	In the early days, when it first happened, my Internet website went down. Now the fellow who was handling it, he got me a temporary site, and on the temporary site it said [the business’ name] would never die. Contact [owner’s name] at [business’ name.com,] . . . . Well I mean that helped a lot, because when people were trying to get in touch with me, they were able to reach me that way.
Nonprofit-35	We assembled this bulletin board, so people could sign in and say, “Hey, I’m okay,” and we began to use that as a conversation tool for shoppers and producers to find one another, and then eventually vote within the next couple of weeks of which market do we reopen, because we had 4 and one was in flooded territory.
FamEntertain-12	We had a website, of course. We always had a website. And then we made changes to the website from where we were in Dallas, where I was in Dallas, and there were a couple of us that were in Dallas and scattered, so we made changes there to keep it updated, because we thought, well, maybe our employees will try to contact us through the website, they’ll try to find us through the website. So we were always pretty up to date on that website
Shipping/Freight/Storage-52	And he could get Internet service at his girlfriend’s mother’s house, so he would take his laptop over there. I could get fax service from a friend’s house down on Bourbon Street, so we were, he’d get something on the email, tell me . . . fax, I’d . . . Bourbon Street . . . .
Business-4	I got up at three o’clock in the morning—I get up early anyway—so got online, got halfway through and lost the connection. So I called up. They had a number that I had written down, so I called up and they did the entire application at about five a.m. for me on the cell phone, and my cell phone almost ran out of juice, it was so long. But they had my telephone number to call me back.
Prof/Legal-6	And then customers were like that as well. They were scattered. You might have some of them at this branch office in Dallas, and some of them in Houston, some of them wherever. And everyone was scattered, so that practically the only way you could communicate was email, from a business perspective, unless you happened to have their cell phone numbers before. But like cell phones, they didn’t work for a while, and so you’d end up having to get another cell phone with a different area code because the 504 area code just didn’t work. So there was most of the contact, especially initially, was by email.
Restaurant/Bar-25	So in mid-October, I mean our main marketing tool was an email list. We had this email program. At the time we were using Constant Contact, which is a well-known email program, had about 4,000 people on my email database. This is the mail way we stayed in touch with our customers and done marketing the entire time.

Resilience Without ICTs

RQ2 asked about how organizations enact resilience without the aid of ICTs. In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, ICTs were only of sporadic use because of overloaded systems or physically damaged servers and cell towers. One family entertainment center described this situation as a sort of communication vacuum following the hurricane (Table 4, FamEntertain-1). In the absence of geographically close network partners or working ICT, participants reported turning to proximate others, on both organizational and personal levels, for assistance and support. For example, a bar reported pooling resources with any other businesses open on their street in order to survive (Table 4, Restaurant/Bar-42); a culinary education-focused organization expanded to be a more conventional restaurant, thus opening its doors to anyone after the storm. At this point, the owner reported, they were not open for profit, but rather were just using their physical space to build a community (Table 4, Restaurant/Bar-25).

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Table 4.

Resilience Without Information and Communication Technologies.

Organizations	Quotations
FamEntertain-1	The lack of communication, that was really, really hard. You’re functioning in a modern world, but you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t communicate. You can’t let anybody know how you’re doing. That was really, really hard. . . . Other than that, there’s nobody to talk to. There’s nobody to communicate with, so that was a big problem. . . . There were no phones. There was no anything.
Restaurant/Bar-42	And we were there every afternoon, and a lot of people in the neighborhood were working on their houses, who would come in like we did, and we just had our doors open. We had a generator running. We had some ice that we’d bring in every day and ice down some cold drinks, and people would come by, we’d just give it to them.
Restaurant/Bar-25	So we’d jam out, and we’d jam out music, and just have people come, and people would just come by and drink, whatever, get some food. So that was one thing we kind of did is kind of create a community. And you’ve got to understand that everyone had been gone from the city for like 6 weeks, 8 weeks. Cell phones worked horribly. People’s phones were still down. So I mean the ability to come on a Saturday night and see all your friends was huge. I mean it was a really like, I mean I can’t tell you how many tearful hugging reunions I witnessed in our space.
Prof/Legal-6	But because I was in Houston, I started like calling on new potential customers there, and so I ended up actually developing more business there, as did my business partner.
Business-27	No, no. I would say, I’d say 60% of them do not have Internet, because being a store you’ve got seamstresses and stuff like that. They don’t have a computer or have Internet. Those are the ones we were having trouble with.

Others started to branch out and work with new clients or partners who were proximate during evacuation. For example, a communication consultant described supplementing her consulting business with clients from Houston (Table 4, Prof/Legal-6). A bank described having an evacuation plan in place through which employees were relocated to existing bank offices in alternate locations. In many cases, businesses that engaged with proximate others during evacuation also relied on ICTs to accomplish their work. However, they were working around the disruption in New Orleans by relocating and rebuilding networks in their evacuated space.

Some early efforts at resilience without ICT were buoyed by a feeling of community camaraderie, but that was quickly supplemented with ICT use when it was available. For example, the restaurant that used its space to throw a community party quickly implemented mass email lists and offered free Internet service at their restaurant as a way to reconnect and rebuild their business. While there were organizations that were not able to begin business operations until people started to return to New Orleans, or until ICT was back up and running (Table 4, Business-27), even organizations that did not rely heavily on ICT for day-to-day operations did use ICT to coordinate clean-up efforts and to locate employees. Therefore, even though their use of ICT was more limited, it was still used in the initial stages of recovery.

ICT Use in Stages

RQ3 asked how post-disaster ICT use reflected phases of recovery. Though the purpose and frequency of ICT use evolved through the stages, the primary utilization reflected the three overall emergent themes: coordinating contacts, coordinating resources, and enacting work routines. Noteworthy was that, at the time of the interviews, a few of the struggling organizations seemed stuck in the professional emergency or beginnings of the transitional phase.

Personal emergency

Directly after the hurricane, organizational leaders reported dealing with limitations in technology (Table 5, Restaurant/Bar-18). Cell towers and local servers were down, and landline phones were inoperable. Business leaders primarily reported communicating FtF, or via email. It was during this stage that texting also began to emerge, although participants also reported being unfamiliar with the technology. During this stage, most communication was directed to personal contacts, as business leaders relied on family outside of New Orleans to provide both shelter and working technology. Participants reported that the local radio station WWL TV and radio, as well as the website for the local newspaper, noaa.com, were invaluable sources of information (Table 5, FamEntertain-30).

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Table 5.

Information and Communication Technology Integration at Short, Medium, and Long-term Intervals.

Organizations	Quotations
FamEntertain-30	On the Internet. Actually, the Times Picayune, our newspaper, published them. There was a link and that was a way people found out what they were coming home to. It was a full blocked grid coverage of the city. It was like a map of New Orleans and then there was like a bingo game, D7.
Restaurant/Bar-18	Yeah. So, well right after, yeah, I mean nothing was working. So, you know, I mean for a while after. I heard from. I actually had two. I had a manager here and a manager at the other store before the storm. And they. The Saturday before the storm, I had to come to both stores and close up and make sure everything was done and whatever. But soon after I talked to them. At that point I did not know what was going on. In fact, I said, look, I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know the status of the stores at this point. Just give me a week after . . . .
FamEntertain-14	Our website becomes a very important place . . . actually we did have a blog on our website . . . briefly that we took down after it wasn’t really needed.
Prof/Legal-6	But I think email was really the biggest factor. And then afterwards, even once we were, like probably for at least the first 6 months of 2006, like our reports that we generate for our referral sources, you know, our customers, they were all sent on email and many of them were sent by email.
Corp/LgProfit-23	I think our plan, I think most business’ plans were good, generally speaking. Now there were lessons learned. . . . Telecommunications was a big challenge and that’s where much of our focus will be this next time, to make sure that people have cell phones and laptops when they leave.
Nonprofit-35	But everything of importance, that keeps us afloat and running, will be uploaded onto our website as a document, a digital document that sits in, I don’t know, Australia—I don’t know where the server is—to ensure that we have it saved someplace digitally.
Business-7	So now we have a 1-800 emergency hotline and these little cards for people to carry with them at all times because we evacuate sometimes two or three times a year. So now we have a backup website now a little distance so we can get in touch with each other.

Retaining Patterns of Use

RQ4 asked if organizations retained patterns of ICT use that were enacted during recovery. While most patterns of use went back to predisaster conditions, a theme that emerged was the incorporation of lessons learned into preparation for future emergencies.

Technology-in-Practice and Organizational Resilience

Arguably, resilience for any organization rests on its capacity to carry on work operations regardless of circumstance. The flexibility afforded by ICTs enabled organizations in this study to rebuild and extend communication networks, gather resources, and enact work routines from a distance. Taken together, the emergent themes suggest that connection, coordination, and creating context were the cornerstones of resilience for organizations. While connecting, coordinating, and creating context were often accomplished with conventional uses of existing technology, such as email and phone, consistent with Orlikowski’s concept of technology-in-practice, organizational leaders also adopted their ICT use to the context at hand, creating new patterns of ICT use that were incorporated into overall ICT usage. This pattern was evidenced in three main ways: The adoption of text-messaging for work communication; the use of websites to initiate and maintain contact with both internal and external stakeholders; and the use of ICTs in conjunction with other ICTs. Connecting was the integral first step. Finding personal and professional contacts were the necessary conditions for enacting organizational resilience. Once that was accomplished, coordination of material, emotional, and informational resources was key to getting an approximation of work up and running. Finally, creating context, or intersubjectivity (Weick, 1993), allowed organizations to carry on work routines and move towards recovery. By connecting with employees across distance via ICTs, organizations created a shared vision of moving forward with leaders communicating goals, priorities, and progress to employees. Other research shows that postcrisis coordinating across distance can be hampered by a lack of context or shared understanding of the environment in which each team is acting (Reddy et al., 2009). Yet the communication facilitated by the ICTs enabled leaders to overcome this situation by creating a shared context for employees to work together despite geographic distance.

The data suggest that ICT use, specifically incoming emails and blog posts from external stakeholders, empowered organizational leaders to act. A particular decision-making challenge that leaders faced after Katrina was whether they should return and when. The emails and blog posts of support received about how customers were “ready and waiting” to do business provided some impetus for organizations to return. ICTs being used as a way to coordinate two-way communication echoes the importance of open organizational boundaries. Others (Taylor & Perry, 2005; Taylor & Kent, 2007) have shown the importance of using the Internet to open boundaries and enable two-way, interactive communication following crisis as well as to provide real-time status updates and connect visitors to other relevant information. While these studies focused more on a public relations approach to reputation management, our findings support this idea and extend it to the area of organizational recovery. Perhaps a fifth source of resilience (Weick, 1993) and adding to ways to measure resilience (Kendra, 2001; Bruneau et al., 2002) is external availability through the use of ICTs to open up boundaries to the public. The findings presented here highlight future considerations about the extent to which a disaster event might transform the way organizations make their communication systems symmetric with their stakeholders.

Mass communication, both one-way and two-way, is important during a crisis. While some respondents reported using websites or blogs specifically to contact missing employees, others left the forums open to give and receive updates. Participants also cited the importance of both public and personal blogs for status updates, emotional support, and decisions about when to return to New Orleans. Previous research has supported the idea that public message boards are more useful than one-on-one technology during crisis, as it enables emergency workers who are passing through or checking in to ascertain both status of patients and command structure (Reddy et al., 2009). Although the public message boards in Reddy et al. (2009) were for colocated teams, the idea of information being made available via an easy-to-update, mass communication platform (rather than one-on-one level) is the same.

Technologies like blogs and texting are more resilient in times of crisis because of the infrastructure that powers them and because both functions can be accomplished using a mobile device (Macias et al., 2009). Both the technological platforms and their uses allowed those affected to check in when they could and organize on the fly. The durability of the technology is important during crisis, and the nature of the information being ready and waiting when people have the access to check in is key for the users. Organizations, emergency response teams, and individuals can benefit from mass communication like blogs and bulletin boards during recovery.

In line with the research on sequential ICT use (Stephens, 2007), results also showed that participants tend to make successive use of different media modalities when accomplishing tasks, such as filling out a grant application online, getting city permits, or searching contact information of existing ties. But in expanding this work to the disaster context, findings indicate that certain social contacts play a key role in the process of modality switching. That is, a social contact serves as the “hub” so that information or resources can be transmitted and received by the organizations through different media. Taken together, the ways in which organizations adapted their technological structures to their communication needs emphasize the importance of redundancy, creativity, and user ability in organizational resilience. The findings reflecting adaptive ICT use show that following Hurricane Katrina, technology became more than interchangeable; it became innovative, echoing Weick’s (1993) assertion that improvisation and an attitude of wisdom are key elements in resilient behavior. This finding suggests that in an emergency, multiple ICTs used in multiple ways are key to organizational resilience. Organizational leaders and emergency planners should incorporate redundancy into communication plans in order to overcome obstacles created by crisis.

However, ICTs were not always useful or available to organizations attempting to regroup and recover. While some did not rely heavily on ICTs before the hurricane and therefore did not have the knowledge or resources to adapt technology to the issues at hand, others simply could not overcome the challenges posed by the hurricane. Shortcomings of technology have been cited as a problem in the coordination of emergency efforts among different agencies (Reddy et al., 2009), with emergency department and emergency medical teams citing the utility of paper records transferred with patients in a crisis over the utility of tracking records via ICT. However, findings support the idea that organizations were able to find temporary solutions, including pooling resources and lending assistance to others who were stranded. These findings are relevant in two ways. First, they are consistent with Katz and Rice (2002), in that results showed that in the absence of ICTs in an emergency situation, organizations will come together with proximate others to share resources and promote goodwill. While Katz and Rice (2002) evidenced this finding on an individual level, this study shows the same trend present on the organizational level. Future research should look at whether this goodwill lasts or relationships return to predisaster status as organizations move out of crisis mode. Additionally, this finding points to a potential digital divide between organizations that can and do utilize technology regularly, and those that do not. While the main focus of this study was on organizations that were able to leverage ICTs successfully for resilience, future research should consider the implications of this digital divide in organizational recovery.

Temporal ICT Use

Considering the data in terms of sequential stages underscores the facts that (a) ICTs can be used to serve a variety of purposes, depending on how they are used, and that (b) how ICTs are used will change as the environment changes. While Orlikowski (2000) focused on recurrent use of technology by users, this study shows that technology can also be contingently adapted to move an organization through a period of change successfully. This contingency acceptance of ICTs can be extended to a fifth stage of disaster recovery labeled an anticipated stage. While the anticipated stage is not one that organizations enact as part of their recovery cycle, it is a stage that could serve as the first stage in organizational recovery strategies. Because the anticipated stage is based on lessons learned from previous disasters, it has the potential to alter and improve future communicative response to crisis.