A Human-Centric Architecture for Net-Centric Operations

To be effective, modern military command and control requires an enormous amount of communication, coordination, and collaboration among the various forces, services, and coalition partners involved. Many tools have been developed or adopted from industry to meet this need; however, these same tools have significant limitations, the most important being that none of the technologies are Òaware ofÓ the other or able to easily share information with one another. As a result, each of the information ÒspacesÓ addressed by these tools effectively remains separate and uncoordinated, and effective communication, coordination, and collaboration suffer. To address this situation we propose developing a single, multi-purpose information exchange and knowledge management tool that leverages the strengths of the various tools in use today while overcoming their weaknesses; and that facilitates distributed, coordinated, collaboration by military personnel - in other words, a Distributed Coordinated Collaboration Spaces (DCCS) tool. The DCCS tool will, a) facilitate the rapid development of shared mental models and improved SA among its users, b) support distributed synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, c) allow users working in one information space to coordinate and collaborate with users in other information spaces, and d) promote collaborative discussion and analysis of uncertain, ambiguous, or conflicting data.