Improving Collaboration in Command and Control Environments: Creating and Exchanging Iconic Tags of Key Information

摘要

Collaborative command and control environments for team decision making and situation assessment are becoming increasingly more distributed in time and space. Shared understanding among team members with regard to the impact, importance, and quality of relevant information items (e.g., sensor outputs, text documents, images, message traffic, web pages) is a critical element in the selection of an effective course of action. Here, we focus on the issues of (1) what is the minimum information that needs to be exchanged for shared understanding to occur, (2) how do we capture that information and (3) how should it best be displayed. Distributed teams that communicate asynchronously require a knowledge management plug-in tool that will convert, encapsulate, and tag a group member's subjective understanding of a complex information item into an iconic representation that represent various information parameters. These icons are referred to as Information Objects (IOBs) and are automatically generated from an abstraction template completed by a team member for each decision-relevant information item. These IOBs can then easily be electronically exchanged among the team, improving shared understanding, consensus building, and information fusion among group members and significantly reducing the valuable decision time typically consumed by conflict resolution.