Guest Editorial Preface: Special Issue on IT-Support for Crisis and Continuity Management

On 21 January 2013, there was a fire at the central office of a telecommunications network operator in Siegen, which resulted in more than 500,000 telephone connections being collapsed for several hours and occasionally several days. Emergency calls were also not possible. The websites of the district and the control center were offline. The local radio which typically acts as a central point of information in such situations was out of service. But not only the civic-societal continuity, also the operational continuity was affected (Reuter et al., 2017). In this example, both continuity and crisis management are essential to recover to regular business resp. life.