1 CONVERGING APPROACHES TO AUTOMATED COMMUNICATIONS-BASED ASSESSMENT OF TEAM SITUATION AWARENESS

Collaboration enables people to execute tasks that are beyond the capabilities of any one of them. Each member of an organization or team has a set of skills, roles, and responsibilities that, when executed accurately and in synchronization with other members of that organization or team, enables them to accomplish the work of the organization. In complex, dynamic environments, team collaboration is more than the simple aggregation of the work products of individuals; collaboration also requires complex exchanges of information, largely through spoken or written language. Linguistic communication is the choreography of team performance. Modern networked information systems support synchronous and asynchronous communication among globally distributed team members via telephone, e-mail, instant messaging, and text chat-rooms, making possible the coordination of activities that would have been impossible or impractical in the past. The distributed project coordination common in commercial organizations would not be tenable without these technologies. However, these technologies do not ensure highly effective organization. Cognitive collaboration quality varies significantly between teams, whether they are collocated Gorman, & Kiekel, this volume). When collaboration tools do make a difference, it is not 2 always positive. These tools increase the opportunity for information overload; errors of commission (miscommunication) can increase relative to errors of omission (non-communication); and decisions and actions sometimes – and sometimes tragically – are The Department of Defense (DoD) uses networked collaboration technologies to coordinate distributed, heterogeneous forces for both wartime and peacetime activities. Such coordination is a key element of Network Centric Warfare or Network Centric Operations (NCO), a theory of warfare in the information age. Among the primary tenets of NCO is the belief that networked information and collaboration increases " shared situation awareness " , a common understanding of the state of the mission environment. This, in turn, is predicted to enhance the effectiveness of forces (Alberts, 2002). Some critics foresee a concurrent increase in the errors cited above. The debate is important to the nation's economic health, as well as its defense. However, NCO concepts are not the sole province of military organizations; they are also being applied in large and economically important commercial organizations. Effective work product requires that the individual contributors align their understanding of the state of the commercial environment, the corporate mission within it, and their responsibilities. Tools such as data dashboards, knowledge portals, distributed conferencing applications, and chat are often installed to facilitate this. Corporations, like DoD, are putting …