Secondary Data Reviews in the Context of Humanitarian Needs Assessments: Determination of Requirements

The importance of humanitarian logistics has been increasingly recognized during recent years. Similar to logistics processes in the commercial sector, humanitarian logistics is driven by demand. Determining this demand is essential for the management of the whole procurement and distribution process. Therefore, humanitarian organizations developed various needs assessment routines. Immediately after the onset of a disaster, they start to collect and analyze the available data. This process of reviewing secondary data is highly complex and often unstructured. However, accurate information in this early stage of aid operations can be very beneficial for the determination of demand and the according humanitarian procurement and distribution processes. Therefore, the support of Secondary Data Reviews by regarding routines and procedures or a particular tool seems to be appropriate. This paper aims to identify functional requirements on such tool‐supported Secondary Data Reviews. A four steps approach has been applied in order to determine the regarding requirements, including the requirements elicitation, analysis, specification and validation. Information has been gathered by expert interviews and the review of documents. As a result, 215 relevant requirement specifications could be derived.