IBM Disaster Management Patent

IBM have applied for a patent on "System and method for optimizing the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos ". Essentially this is a generic description of how to allocate people to tasks. It really has nothing to do with disasters or with computer implementation (the same thing is applied to organizing a children's birthday party). It is unfortunate that organizations which otherwise try to present themselves as having corporate social responsibility and technological expertise would risk their reputations with such patents.

A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for finding skills and resources for a chaotic event. Skills data for the chaotic event are organized. A determination is made whether the skills and the resources are available in response to a receiving an identification of the skills and the resources that are required to manage the chaotic event. The skills and the resources are optimized based on requirements and constraints, potential skills, and enabling resources to determine optimized skills and optimized resources. The availability of the optimized skills and the optimized resources are verified. The optimized skills and the optimized resources are reoptimized in response to a determination that the optimized skills and the optimized resources are unavailable. ...

From: System and method for optimizing the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos, United States Patent Application, 20080077463 , Friedlander; Robert R. ; et al., International Business Machines Corporation, March 27, 2008