An Exploratory Social Network Analysis of Military and Civilian Emergency Operation Centers Focusing on Organization Structure

The purpose of this research was to explore how United States Air Force Emergency Operation Centers (EOC) compare to civilian EOCs with respect to their task-based social networks and decision making social networks. Multiple measures were explored to understand the networks, which included analyzing key metrics of the network such as closeness centrality and betweenness centrality, centralization of the network, and comparison of structural holes within the networks. These measures were then used to suggest improvements for the organizations to improve performance and more importantly, interoperability. The results of the study showed that in this data set there were several differences between how military and civilian networks are structured. These differences could lead to incongruencies that could cause chaos, delays, duplication of effort, and inefficiency when multiple EOCs are responding to a crisis event. While the cause of the differences is unclear the social network methodology provides new and informative insight into the form and properties of the networks