BattleSense: An Innovative Design Approach for Combat Systems

The U.S. Navy is taking revolutionary actions to redesign itself around the opportunities afforded by advanced technologies. These technologies provide Navy personnel with greater amounts of data, but that, by itself, is not enough. Information has to serve a purpose: to improve the ability of decision makers to make sense of situations and to understand how events are unfolding. Therefore, Navy personnel have to be able to continuously make sense of information, not merely receive it. The focus of this SBIR effort is on sensemaking. Currently, system designers who are shaping the Navy’s use of IT do not have a clear conceptual framework, nor tools or methods for ensuring that individuals and teams can keep up with increased information to make better and faster decisions. The goal of this project is to provide Navy system designers with a BattleSense methodology and support tools for uncovering and leveraging sensemaking requirements. In Phase I we successfully developed and piloted a sensemaking methodology. In Phase II we will apply and validate that methodology and then formalize designer support tools for use by the Navy. Our immediate Phase III objective will be to transition these tools into the DD(X) and LCS programs.