Overview  

OCHA is fundamentally an information management organization. Our role in the humanitarian system is not to deliver food, shelter, health care, or other kinds of direct aid to affected people. Instead, our job is to bring together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent and coordinated response to emergencies. This task requires our entire organization to engage in gathering, organizing, sharing, analysing, and communicating information about humanitarian crises.

An OCHA information management officer (IMO) plays a critical role in the enabling our role in the humanitarian system.  As IMOs we need to be aware of core guidance documents.  The challenge is to provide the right information to the right people so better decisions can be made and better outcomes achieved.

Essential Reading for OCHA IMOs

Familiarity with these five pieces of guidance, will provide an IMO with a solid foundation of the role of information management in an OCHA office and how IM fits within the larger humanitarian context. Collectively, these documents outline a list of IM responsibilities that individual IMOs and IM teams are responsible for in every OCHA office.

• IASC: Operational Guidance, 2008
  Perhaps the most important IM-focused guidance document, describing the relationship between OCHA and the clusters, as well as many of the individual tasks IMOs are responsible for.
• Policy Instruction: The Roles and Responsibilities of Country Offices, 2010
  Although this policy instruction needs to be updated it provides a genuinely useful framework of how OCHA operates in at a country level including situational awareness and whole of office approach, describes what a country office should do, how to build a common approach, strategy and implementation plan, office size and structure, cost-plans, supervision and internal reporting.  
  
  
  
• IASC: Emergency Response Preparedness (ERP), 2015
  Basic framework for county-level preparedness.  
  
  
• IASC: Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC) reference module, 2014
  Describes how agencies work together to provide relief
  
  
• IASC: Common Operational Datasets (COD),2016 

Describes the most important baseline data especially administrative boundaries and population data

Recommended Reading for OCHA IMOs

• GA Resolution 46/182

GA Resolution 46/182 directly established many cornerstones of humanitarian action including DHA, which became OCHA in 1998.  Principals layed out in the resolution include:

• Recognized the importance of humanitarian assistance, including for conflict (‘other emergencies’)
• Established the initial 3 humanitarian principles (independence added in 2004)
• State sovereignty must be respected (undermined by humanitarian imperative)
• States have primary responsibility
• But states capacity can sometimes by overwhelmed
• Importance of prevention and preparedness

• OCHA Policy Instruction on Response

The PI on response describes how OCHA responds to sudden-onset or rapidly deteriorating crises. It includes a timeline of the first hours, days, weeks and months. More recent than the policy instruction on country offices, so more in-line with HPC

• Inter-Cluster Coordination Group (ICCG) Terms of Reference 
• Information Management Working Group (IMWG) Guidance on Common Operational Datasets (CODs)